The History of Jihad (Robert Spencer)

THE HISTORY OF

JIHAD

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A BOMBARDIER BOOKS BOOK
An Imprint of Post Hill Press

ISBN: 978-1-68261-659-8

ISBN (eBook): 978-1-68261-660-4

The History of Jihad:

From Muhammad to ISIS

© 2018 by Robert Spencer

All Rights Reserved

Cover Design by Cody Corcoran

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or

transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author
and publisher.

rN

Racks

Post Hill Press
New York * Nashville
posthillpress.com

Published in the United States of America
Printed in Canada

DEDICATION

Dedicated to the untold malhons of victims of jihad, from the
seventh century to today. May you somehow receive justice.

EAROCUCUION, easy ss paeeins nae PEARS en wee eee aa nanenes 11
Chapter One:

“T Bring You Slaughter”: The Battles of Muhammad.......... i
Chapter Two: The Age of the Great Conquests .............. 47
Chapter Three: The Jihad Comes to Spain and India... ....:..77
Chapter Four: Consolidation and Oppression................ 115
Chapter Five: The Victims of Jihad Strike Back.............. 145
Chapter Six: The Jihad Advances into Europe ..............- 181

Chapter Seven: The Ottomans and Mughals in Ascendance . . . .219

Chapter Bignte ren c0rnde « 5 a0 < on Hew a ooo Ms 2s es S 6 251
chapter Mine: Reqursences 4 cca Ss: hues § Cowie esa rena ee 287
Chapter Ten: The West Loses the Will to Live .............. 329
PGi). o oye ese meee aaa eee ck seem e re 373
Piclem@mieGonients 25350) Ease oe eee ee eee meme aa 415
DibWagraphy «sacs dees hd Hides sp Rends e mes ge aE ew RE 417
Cc i ee ee eS ere eee. ee 425

INTRODUCTION

This book attempts, for the first time in the English language, to provide
a general overview of jihad activity from the time when the concept of
jihad was invented (and arguably even before that) to the present day—
from Arabia to North Africa and Persia, from Spain to India, from Tel
Aviv to New York City.

In amassing this history of jihad from Muhammad to ISIS, I have
endeavored wherever possible to quote the words of contemporary wit-
nesses to the various events described, so that the reader may get some
impression of how it was to experience the advance of jihad.

The accounts included in this book are as noteworthy for what they
don’t say as for what they do. The attentive reader will note that there is
no period since the beginning of [slam that was characterized by large-
scale peaceful coexistence between Muslims and non-Muslims. There
was no time when mainstream and dominant Islamic authorities taught
the equality of non-Muslims with Muslims, or the obsolescence of jihad
warfare. There was no Era of Good Feeling, no Golden Age of Tol-
erance, no Paradise of Proto-Multiculturalism. There has always been,
with virtually no interruption, jihad.

Nor is jihad in Islamic theology primarily, or even prominently, any-
thing but warfare against unbelievers. The Qur'an contains numerous
exhortations to fight against the infidels, as do all the 4adizh collections
of Muhammad’s words and deeds. It directs Muslims to “fight those who
do not believe in Allah and the Last Day and do not forbid what Allah
and his messenger have forbidden, nor practice the religion of truth, even
if they are of the People of the Book, until they pay the jizya with willing

12 Tue History oF JIHAD: From MunAMMAD TO ISIS

submission and feel themselves subdued” (9:29). Nor does Muhammad
mention any other pretext for an attack when he expands upon this pas-
sage with more detailed instructions on fighting against unbelievers:

Fight in the name of Allah and in the way of Allah. Fight
against those who disbelieve in Allah. Make a holy war;
do not embezzle the spoils; do not break your pledge; and
do not mutilate (the dead) bodies; do not kill the children.
When you meet your enemies who are polytheists, invite
them to three courses of action. If they respond to any one
of these you also accept it and withhold yourself from do-
ing them any harm. Invite them to (accept) Islam; if they
respond to you, accept it from them and desist from fight-
ing against them.... If they refuse to accept Islam, demand
from them the jizya. If they agree to pay, accept it from
them and hold off your hands. If they refuse to pay the tax,
seek Allah’s help and fight them.’

This triple imperative of conversion, subjugation, or death is reinforced
in Islamic law. One manual of Islamic law that some of Sunni Islam’s
foremost authorities have certified as conforming to the “practice and
faith of the orthodox Sunni community” states flatly that the “lesser ji-
had” means “war against non-Muslims.” The Muslim community is di-
rected to make war “upon Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians...until they
become Muslim or pay the non-Muslim poll tax.”

Most Muslims are Sunnis. There are four schools of Sunni Muslim
jurisprudence: the Shafi, Hanafi, Hanbali, and Maliki. These are not
brick and mortar schools, but schools of thought, of interpretation of
Islamic law. The legal manual quoted above originated with the Shafi’i
school; a Hanafi authority, meanwhile, states that the infidels must first
be called to embrace Islam, “because the Prophet so instructed his com-
manders, directing them to call the infidels to the faith.” It adds that
Muslims must not wage jihad in order to enrich themselves, but only
for the cause of Islam. And when the infidels hear the call to Islam, they
“will hence perceive that they are attacked for the sake of religion, and
not for the sake of taking their property, or making slaves of their chil-
dren, and on this consideration it is possible that they may be induced to

INTRODUCTION 13

agree to the call, in order to save themselves from the troubles of war.”*

However, things will go badly for the non-Muslims who choose not
to convert or pay the tax. Muslims must “make war upon them, because
God is the assistant of those who serve Him, and the destroyer of His
enemies, the infidels, and it is necessary to implore His aid upon every
occasion; the Prophet, moreover, commands us so to do.”*

Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), a Maliki jurist as well as a pioneering
historian and philosopher who authored one of the first works of histo-
riography, likewise notes that “in the Muslim community, the holy war is
a religious duty, because of the universalism of the Muslim mission and
(the obligation to) convert everybody to Islam either by persuasion or
by force.” Islam is “under obligation to gain power over other nations.”
And the Hanbali jurist Ibn Taymiyya (1263-1328) directed that “since
lawful warfare is essentially jihad and since its aim is that the religion is
God’s entirely and God’s word is uppermost, therefore according to all
Muslims, those who stand in the way of this aim must be fought.”’

These are old authorities, but none of these Sunni schools of juris-
prudence have ever reformed or rejected these directives. The Shiite
schools teach much the same things. Jihad as a spiritual struggle is a
secondary concept at best for both, even though it bears the designation
“greater jihad.”

Only in our strange age has this quite obvious fact been controvert-
ed, with those who point it out being excoriated as bigots. Nonetheless,
the historical record speaks for itself, even more loudly and clearly than
it usually does. It is my hope that readers with an open mind and a
willingness to consider unwelcome facts, as rare as those people may
be nowadays, will see this record for what it is, and ponder carefully its
implications for the future of free societies around the globe.

Robert Spencer

Sherman Oaks, California
January 2018

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CHAPTER ONE

‘T BRING YOU SLAUGHTER’:
THE BATTLES OF MUHAMMAD

Jihad, 622-632

VICTORIOUS WITH TERROR

“I have been made victorious with terror.”!

Muhammad, the Prophet of Islam, died suddenly and unexpected-
ly, complaining that he felt the way he had several years earlier, when
he was poisoned.’ As death approached, the founder of Islam muttered
those fateful words that could have been his epitaph: “I have been made
victorious with terror.”?

It was a fitting summation of his entire public career.

The beginnings of Islam are shrouded in mystery. There are thou-
sands upon thousands of reports (Aadith, plural ahadith or hadiths) of
the words and deeds of Islam’s Prophet Muhammad, but virtually all
of them date from the eighth and ninth centuries, over a century and a
half after Muhammad’s death, which is traditionally set in 632. There is
considerable reason to believe that the origins of Islam and the lives of
its founding figures are quite different from how they’re represented in
Islamic sacred history.’

Yet for all that, those words and deeds of Muhammad as recorded
in the Aadith are indeed Islamic sacred history, and thus are believed and
taken as fact by millions of Muslims, many of whom act upon those be-
liefs daily in various ways. Just as Jesus’ words and deeds in the Gospels
can be known and studied aside from the question of their historicity, so

16 Tue History or Jinap: From MuHAMMAD To ISIS

also can Muhammad’s. The words and deeds of Islam’s founder, and the
various events that formed Islam as a religious and political force, form
the foundation of Islamic faith to this day. As Islam is an ever-growing
presence in the West, these elements of Islam should be known, regard-
less of their historical value or lack thereof.

Many of the key events of the life of Muhammad and the hundred
years following his death as recorded by early Muslim historians most
likely never happened, but as they are part of Islamic belief and the Is-
lamic worldview to this day, it is important that those whose lives are
increasingly affected by these teachings know and understand them.

NO REJECTION WITHOUT
CONSEQUENCES

Islamic legend has it that Muhammad began as a preacher of religious
ideas, expounding the simple and uncompromising message that there
was only one true god and Muhammad was his prophet.

These were never claims one could reject without consequences.

First came warnings of hellfire. Then, when Muhammad's own peo-
ple, the Quraysh tribe of Mecca, rejected his claim of being a prophet,
his message began to take on a hard edge for the rejecters in this world.
The jihad—Arabic for “struggle’—that Muhammad preached often be-
gan to refer specifically to warfare against those who denied his prophet-
hood or the oneness of the deity.

One scorching day, Muhammad approached a group of Quraysh at
the Ka’bah, the cube-shaped building in Mecca said to have been built
by the patriarch Abraham and his son Ishmael. Muhammad kissed the
black stone, the meteorite that the Arabs believed to have been thrown
by Allah down to earth at that spot, and walked around the shrine three
times. Then he fixed the Quraysh with a furious gaze and said: “Will you
listen to me, O Quraysh? By him who holds my life in His hand, I bring
you slaughter.”

And he did—not just to the Quraysh but to the entire world, as
Muslims for fourteen hundred years heard his message of jihad warfare
against the infidel and acted upon his words.

CHAPTER ONE 17

But then a helpful revelation came from Allah, explaining that the
Quraysh’s opposition to Muhammad was worse than the Muslims’ vio-
lation of the sacred month, and therefore the raid was justified:

They ask you about the sacred month—about fighting
therein. Say, “Fighting therein is great sin, but averting peo-
ple from the way of Allah and disbelief in Him and al-Mas-
jid al-Haram and the expulsion of its people therefrom are
worse in the sight of Allah. And ftnaé [disturbance, perse-
cution] is greater than killing.” (Qur’an 2:217)

Whatever sin the Nakhla raiders had committed in violating the sa-
cred month was nothing compared to the Quraysh’s fénah. Ibn Ishaq
explained: “They have kept you back from the way of God with their
unbelief in Him, and from the sacred mosque, and have driven you from
it when you were with its people. This is a more serious matter with God
than the killing of those whom you have slain.””

Once he received this revelation, Muhammad took the beoty and
prisoners that Abdullah had brought him. This was a momentous inci-
dent, for it would set a precedent: if a group was guilty of fitvaé, all bets
were off, all moral principles could be set aside. Good became identified
with anything that redounded to the benefit of Muslims and Islam, and

evil with anything that harmed them.

INFLICT SLAUGHTER UPON THEM

The Muslims’ raids on Quraysh caravans precipitated the first major bat-
tle the Muslims fought. Muhammad heard that a large Quraysh caravan,
laden with money and goods, was coming from Syria. He again ordered
his followers to raid it: “This is the caravan of the Quraysh possessing
wealth. It is likely that Allah may give it to you as booty.”*

Some of the Muslims were reluctant; Allah castigated them in a new
revelation: “Those who believe say, “Why has a surah [a chapter of the
Qur’an] not been sent down? But when a precise surah is revealed and
fighting is mentioned therein, you see those in whose hearts is hypocrisy
looking at you with a look of one overcome by death.” (Qur’an 47:20)

18 THe Hisrory oF Jinap: FROM MuHAMMAD TO ISIS

Allah told the Muslims to fight fiercely: “So when you meet those
who disbelieve, strike necks until, when you have inflicted slaughter
upon them, then secure their bonds, and either favor afterwards or ran-
som until the war lays down its burdens.” (Qur’an 47:4)

Muhammad set out toward Mecca to lead the raid. He knew that
the Quraysh would be defending their caravan with an army this time,
but he was confident: “Forward in good heart,” he told his men, “for God
has promised me one of the two parties”—that is, e1ther the caravan
or the army. “And by God, it is as though I now see the enemy lying
prostrate.””? When he saw the Quraysh marching toward the Muslims,
he prayed: “O God, here come the Quraysh in their vanity and pride,
contending with Thee and calling Thy apostle a liar. O God, grant the
help which Thou didst promise me. Destroy them this morning!”""° Abu
Jahl (which means “Father of Ignorance,” a name given him by Muslim
chroniclers; his real name was Amr ibn Hisham), one of the Quraysh
leaders, also felt a defining moment was at hand. Oiling a coat of chain
mail before the battle, he declared: “No, by God, we will not turn back
until God decides between us and Muhammad.””’

BADR

The Quraysh came out to meet Muhammad’s three hundred men at the
village of Badr with a force of nearly a thousand.'’? Muhammad, pan-
icking, warned Allah of the consequences of a Muslim defeat: “O God,
if this band perish today Thou wilt be worshipped no more.” But soon
after that he expressed confidence in spiritual help that would guarantee
the Muslims victory, telling his lieutenant Abu Bakr: “Be of good cheer,
O Abu Bakr. God’s help is come to you. Here is Gabriel holding the rein
of a horse and leading it. The dust is upon his front teeth.”

Muhammad then gave his men a promise that would make them,
and Muslim warriors after them throughout the ages, fight all the hard-
er: “By God in whose hand is the soul of Muhammad, no man will be
slain this day fighting against them with steadfast courage advancing not
retreating but God will cause him to enter Paradise.”"

His men believed him. One exclaimed: “Fine, Fine! Is there nothing
between me and my entering Paradise save to be killed by these men?”

CHAPTER ONE 19

He flung away some dates that he had been eating, rushed into the thick
of the battle, and fought until he was killed. Another asked Muhammad:
“O apostle of God, what makes the Lord laugh with joy at His servant?”
Muhammad answered: “When he plunges into the midst of the enemy
without mail.” The man did so and fought until he was killed.®

Muhammad, far back in the ranks, picked up a few pebbles and
threw them toward the Quraysh, saying, “Foul be those faces!” Then he
ordered the Muslims to charge.’ Despite their superior numbers, the
Quraysh were routed. Some Muslim traditions say that Muhammad
himself participated in the fighting; others, that it was more likely that he
exhorted his followers from the sidelines. In any event, it was an occasion
for him to avenge years of frustration, resentment, and hatred toward
his people who had rejected him. One of his followers later recalled a
curse Muhammad had pronounced on the leaders of the Quraysh: “The
Prophet said, ‘O Allah! Destroy the chiefs of Quraish, O Allah! Destroy
Abu Jahl bin Hisham, Utba bin Rabi’a, Shaiba bin Rabi’a, Ugba bin Abi
Mu’ait, Umaiya bin Khalaf [or Ubai bin Kalaf].’””””

KILLING MUHAMMAD’S ENEMIES

All the men Muhammad cursed were captured or killed during the Bat-
tle of Badr. One Quraysh leader named in this curse, Uqba, pleaded for
his life: “But who will look after my children, O Muhammad?”

Muhammad at this point may have recalled that it had been Uqba
who had thrown camel dung, blood, and intestines on him while he pros-
trated himself in prayer, as the Quraysh chiefs watched and laughed."
He had pronounced a curse on them at that time, and now it was be-
ing fulfilled. Who would care for Uqba's children? “Hell,” Muhammad
snarled, and ordered Uqba killed.”

Abu Jahl was beheaded. The Muslim who severed the head proud-
ly carried his trophy to Muhammad: “I cut off his head and brought
it to the apostle saying, “This is the head of the enemy of God, Abu
Jahl.”” Muhammad was delighted and thanked Allah for the murder of
his enemy.”°

According to another account, two young Muslims murdered Abu
Jahl as he was “walking amongst the people.” One of the murderers ex-

20 Tuer History of Jinap: From MuuamMap To JSIS

plained why: “I have been informed that he abuses Allah’s Messenger. By
Him in Whose Hands my soul is, if I should see him, then my body will
not leave his body till either of us meet his fate.” After they have done
the deed, they went to see the Prophet of Islam, who asked, “Which of
you has killed him?”

Both youths answered, “I have killed him.”

Muhammad thought of a way to resolve the dispute, asking them:
“Have you cleaned your swords?” They answered that they had not, so
Muhammad inspected their weapons and announced: “No doubt, you
both have killed him, and the spoils of the deceased will be given to
Mu’adh bin Amr bin Al-Jamuh,” who was one of the murderers.”!

The bodies of all those named in the curse were thrown into a pit.
As an eyewitness recalled: “Later on I saw all of them killed during the
battle of Badr and their bodies were thrown into a well except the body
of Umaiya or Ubai, because he was a fat man, and when he was pulled,
the parts of his body got separated before he was thrown into the well.””
Then Muhammad taunted them as “people of the pit” and posed a theo-
logical question: “Have you found what God promised you is true? I
have found that what my Lord promised me is true.” When asked why
he was speaking to dead bodies, he replied: “You cannot hear what I say
better than they, but they cannot answer me.””

ALLAH GRANTS VICTORY TO THE PIOUS

The victory at Badr was the turning point for the Muslims and became a
cornerstone of the new religious community’s foundational story. Many
passages of the Qur’an draw lessons for all believers from this battle. Al-
lah emphasized that it was piety, not military might, that brought victory
at Badr: “Already there has been for you a sign in the two armies which
met—one fighting in the cause of Allah and another of disbelievers.
They saw with their eyes that they were twice their number. But Allah
supports with His victory whom He wills. Indeed in that is a lesson for
those of vision.” (Qur'an 3:13)

Another revelation had Allah announcing that armies of angels
joined with the Muslims to smite the Quraysh, and that similar help
would come in the future to Muslims who remained faithful to Allah:

CHAPTER ONE PA

“And already had Allah given you victory at Badr while you were few in
number. Then fear Allah; perhaps you will be grateful when you said to
the believers, ‘Is it not sufficient for you that your Lord should reinforce
you with three thousand angels sent down?’ Yes, if you remain patient
and conscious of Allah and the enemy come upon you in rage, your Lord
will reinforce you with five thousand angels having marks. And Allah
made it not except as good tidings for you and to reassure your hearts
thereby. And victory is not except from Allah, the Exalted in Might, the
Wise.” (Qur'an 3:123-126)

Allah told Muhammad the angels would always help the Muslims
in battle and strike terror into the hearts of the enemies of the Muslims:
“When you asked help of your Lord, and He answered you, ‘Indeed, I
will reinforce you with a thousand from the angels, following one anoth-
er.’... When your Lord inspired the angels, ‘I am with you, so strengthen
those who have believed. I will cast terror into the hearts of those who
disbelieved, so strike upon the necks and strike from them every fin-
gertip.’ That is because they opposed Allah and His Messenger. And
whoever opposes Allah and His Messenger—indeed, Allah is severe in
penalty.” (Qur’an 8:9, 12-13)

Allah warned the Quraysh not to attempt another attack, telling
them they would again be defeated no matter how much more numerous
they were than the Muslims: “Tf you seek the victory, the defeat has come
to you. And if you desist, it is best for you; but if you return, We will re-
turn, and you will never be aided by your company at all, even if it should
increase, because Allah is with the believers.” (Qur'an 8:19)

Allah revealed that the Muslims were not just aided; they were
merely his passive instruments at Badr. Even the pebbles Muhammad
threw toward the Quraysh were not thrown by him, but by Allah: “And
you did not kill them, but it was Allah who killed them. And you did not
throw, when you threw, but it was Allah who threw that He might test
the believers with a good test. Indeed, Allah is Hearing and Knowing.”
(Qur’an 8:17)

Allah promised to grant such victories to pious Muslims even
though they faced odds even more prohibitive than those they had
overcome at Badr: “O Prophet, urge the believers to battle. If there are
among you twenty steadfast, they will overcome two hundred. And if

22 THe History or Jinap:'} From MunHamMapb TO ISIS

there are among you one hundred steadfast, they will overcome a thou-
sand of those who have disbelieved, because they are a people who do
not understand. Now, Allah has lightened the hardship for you, and He
knows that among you is weakness. So if there are from you one hundred
steadfast, they will overcome two hundred. And if there are among you a
thousand, they will overcome two thousand by permission of Allah. And
Allah is with the steadfast.” (Qur’an 8:65—-66)

Thus were first enunciated what would become recurring themes
of jihad literature throughout the centuries to today: piety in Islam will
bring military victory. Allah will send angels to fight with the believing
Muslims, such that they will conquer even against overwhelming odds.

Flush with victory, Muhammad stepped up his raiding operations.
During one of them, against the pagan Ghatafan tribe, he was surprised
by an enemy warrior while resting. The warrior asked him: “Who will
defend you from me today?”

Muhammad replied coolly, “Allah’—whereupon the warrior
dropped his sword. Muhammad seized it quickly and asked, “Who will
defend you from me?”

“None,” said the warrior, and he recited the Shahada (the Muslim
profession of faith) and became a Muslim.”

MUHAMMAD AGAINST THE JEWS

Now Muhammad turned his attention to the Jewish tribes of Medina,
the Banu Qaynugqa, Banu Nadir, and Banu Qurayza, with whom he had
made a covenant when he first arrived in the city.” He was beginning to
chafe under that covenant, and Allah gave him a way out, in the form
of a revelation allowing him to break treaties he had made with groups
when he feared they would betray him, not just when any actual betrayal
had taken place: “If you fear betrayal from a people, throw their trea-
ty back to them on equal terms. Indeed, Allah does not like traitors.”
(Qur’an 8:58)

Muhammad announced, “I fear the Banu Qaynuga,” and resolved to
strike them first.”

Striding into the Qaynuga’s marketplace, he issued a public warn-
ing: “O Jews, beware lest God bring upon you the vengeance that He

CHAPTER ONE 23

brought upon Quraysh and become Muslims. You know that I am a
prophet who has been sent—you will find that in your scriptures and
God’s covenant with you.”

He added in a revelation from Allah, referring to the Battle of Badr:
“Say to those who disbelieve, “You will be overcome and gathered to-
gether to Hell, and wretched is the resting place.’ Already there has been
for you a sign in the two armies which met—one fighting in the cause
of Allah and another of disbelievers. They saw with their eyes that they
were twice their number. But Allah supports with His victory whom He
wills. Indeed in that is a lesson for those of vision.” (Qur'an 3:10)

The Qaynuga Jews were not impressed, and replied: “O Muhammad,
you seem to think that we are your people. Do not deceive yourself because
you encountered a people with no knowledge of war and got the better
of them; for by God if we fight you, you will find that we are real men!””’

Muhammad's forces laid siege to the Qaynugqa until they offered
him unconditional surrender. But then a Muslim—classified as one of
the Hypocrites, those who claimed to be Muslim but disobeyed Allah
and opposed and even mocked Muhammad—pleaded that Muhammad
be merciful with the Qaynuga because he had business connections with
many of them. Muhammad was angered, but he agreed to spare the Qa-
ynuqa if they turned over their property as booty to the Muslims and
left Medina.

However, Muhammad wanted to make sure this sort of thing did
not happen again, and he received a revelation about the relationships
that should prevail between Muslims and non-Muslims: “O you who
have believed, do not take the Jews and the Christians as friends and
allies. They are friends and allies of one another. And whoever 1s a friend
and ally to them among you—then indeed, he is of them. Indeed, Allah
guides not the wrongdoing people.” (Qur’an 5:51)

Allah harshly scolded those who feared a loss of business prospects
because of Muhammad's jihad, warning them not to hurry to the un-
believers’ side: “So you see those in whose hearts is disease hastening to
them, saying, ‘We are afraid a misfortune may strike us.’ But perhaps
Allah will bring conquest or a decision from Him, and they will be-
come, over what they have been concealing within themselves, regretful.”

(Quran5:52)"

24 True History or JinAD: From MuyHamMap TO ISIS

After the Battle of Badr and the action against the Qaynuqa Jews,
Muhammad turned his wrath against a Jewish poet, Ka’b bin Al-Ashraf,
who, according to Ibn Ishaq, “composed amatory verses of an insulting
nature about the Muslim women.””’ Incensed, Muhammad asked his
followers: “Who is willing to kill Ka’b bin Al-Ashraf who has hurt Allah
and His Apostle?”*°

A young Muslim named Muhammad bin Maslama volunteered;
when the Prophet assented, Maslama made a request: “Then allow me
to say a [false] thing [in effect, to deceive Ka’b].”

Muhammad granted his wish, and so Muhammad bin Maslama
went to Ka’b and began to complain about the self-proclaimed prophet
to whom he had dedicated his life: “That man [Muhammad] demands
sadaga |or zakat, alms] from us, and he has troubled us, and I have come
to borrow something from you.” He worked hard to gain Ka’b’s trust,
and in order to get close enough to Ka’b to be able to kill him, professed
to admire Ka’b’s perfume: “I have never smelt a better scent than this....
Will you allow me to smell your head?” Ka’b agreed; Muhammad bin
Maslama thereupon caught Ka’b in a strong grip and commanded his
companions: “Get at him!” They killed Ka’b and then hurried to inform
the Prophet, carrying Ka’b’s head with them.** When Muhammad heard
the news, he screamed, “4//ahu akbar!” and praised Allah.*

After the murder of K’ab, Muhammad issued a blanket command:
“Kill any Jew that falls into your power.”* This was not a military order:
the first victim was a Jewish merchant, Ibn Sunayna, who had “social
and business relations” with the Muslims. The murderer, Muhayissa,
was rebuked for the deed by his brother Huwayissa, who was not yet a
Muslim. Muhayissa was unrepentant. He told his brother: “Had the one
who ordered me to kill him ordered me to kill you I would have cut your
head off.”

Huwayissa was impressed: “By God, a religion which can bring you

to this is marvelous!” He became a Muslim.

CHAPTER ONE 25

UHUD: ALLAH DOES NOT REWARD
THE IMPIOUS

Muhammad would need his help. After their defeat at Badr, the Quraysh
were itching for revenge. They assembled three thousand troops against
one thousand Muslims at a mountain near Mecca named Uhud. Mu-
hammad, brandishing a sword, led the Muslims into battle. This time,
the Quraysh were far more determined, and the Muslims were routed.
Muhammad's child bride, Aisha, later recounted that the Muslims were
initially winning at Uhud, but then their lines collapsed in confusion due
to a supernatural intervention: “Satan, Allah's Curse be upon him, cried
loudly, ‘O Allah’s Worshippers, beware of what is behind! On that, the
front files of the [Muslim] forces turned their backs and started fighting
with the back files.”**

Muhammad himself had his face bloodied and a tooth knocked out;
rumors even flew around the battlefield that he had been killed. When
he was able to find water to wash the blood off his face, Muhammad
vowed revenge: “The wrath of God is fierce against him who bloodied
the face of His prophet.”*’ When Abu Sufyan, the Quraysh commander,
taunted the Muslims, Muhammad told his lieutenant Umar to respond:
“God is most high and most glorious. We are not equal. Our dead are in
paradise; your dead in hell.”**

After Uhud came revelations to explain the setback. While Badr
was Allah’s victory, Uhud was not Allah’s defeat but the result of the
Muslims’ failure of courage and lust for the things of this world, specif-
ically in this case the spoils of war, the goods and women they hoped to
win from the Quraysh: “And Allah had certainly fulfilled His promise to
you when you were killing the enemy by His permission until when you
lost courage and fell to disputing about the order and disobeyed after he
had shown you that which you love. Among you are some who desire
this world, and among you are some who desire the Hereafter. Then he
turned you back from them that He might test you. And He has already
forgiven you, and Allah is the possessor of bounty for the believers.”
(Qur’an 3:152)

Another revelation exhorted the Muslims to fight valiantly, assuring
them that their lives were in no danger until the day Allah had decreed

26 Tue History oF JiHAD: From MuwAMMAD TO ISIS

that they must die: “And it is not for one to die except by permission of
Allah at a decree determined. And whoever desires the reward of this
world, We will give him thereof; and whoever desires the reward of the
Hereafter, We will give him thereof. And we will reward the grateful.”
(Qur’an 3:145)

Allah reminded them of his help given to the Muslims in the past,

and reminded them that piety was the key to victory:

And already had Allah given you victory at Badr while
you were few in number. Then fear Allah; perhaps you
will be grateful, when you said to the believers, “Is it not
sufficient for you that your Lord should reinforce you
with three thousand angels sent down?” Yes, if you re-
main patient and conscious of Allah and the enemy come
upon you in rage, your Lord will reinforce you with five
thousand angels having marks. And Allah made it not
except as good tidings for you and to reassure your hearts
thereby. And victory is not except from Allah, the Exalt-
ed in Might, the Wise, that He might cut down a section
of the disbelievers or suppress them so that they turn
back disappointed. (Qur’an 3:123-127)

The lesson was clear: the only path to success was Islam, and the cause of
all failure was the abandonment of Islam. Allah promised that the Mus-
lims would soon be victorious again, provided that they depended solely
on him and rejected all accord with non-Muslims: “O you who have
believed, if you obey those who disbelieve, they will turn you back on
your heels, and you will become losers. But Allah is your protector, and
He is the best of helpers. We will cast terror into the hearts of those who
disbelieve for what they have associated with Allah of which He had not
sent down authority. And their refuge will be the Fire, and wretched is
the residence of the wrongdoers.” (Qur'an 3:149-151)

CHAPTER ONE oo

DIVINE TERROR DEFEATS THE JEWS

Not long after the Battle of Uhud, some members of one of the Jewish
tribes of Medina, the Banu Nadir, conspired to kill Muhammad by drop-
ping a large stone on his head as he passed by one of their houses. How-
ever, some of the Muslims learned of the plot and notified Muhammad.
Rather than appealing to the leaders of the Nadir to turn over the guilty
men, Muhammad sent word to the Nadir: “Leave my country and do not
live with me. You have intended treachery.”*”

Muhammad told the Muslims, “The Jews have declared war.“ He
ordered his men to march out against the tribe and lay siege to them.”
Finally the Nadir agreed to exile themselves. Muhammad commanded
them to turn over their weapons and allowed them to keep as much of
the rest of their property as they could carry on their camels.” Some of
the Nadir destroyed their houses, loading as much on the backs of their
camels as they possibly could.* The rest of their belongings became
Muhammad's personal property, which he distributed as booty: among
the muhaziroun, the Muslims who had emigrated with him from Mecca
to Medina.“

In a revelation, Allah told Muhammad that it was divine terror that
had defeated the Banu Nadir, and that they were all bound for hell:

Whatever is in the heavens and whatever is on the earth
exalts Allah, and He is the Exalted in Might, the Wise. It
is He who expelled the ones who disbelieved among the
People of the Book from their homes at the first gathering.
You did not think they would leave, and they thought that
their fortresses would protect them from Allah; but Allah
came upon them from where they had not expected, and
He cast terror into their hearts; they destroyed their houses
by their hands and the hands of the believers. So take warn-
ing, O people of vision. And if not that Allah had decreed
for them evacuation, He would have punished them in this
world, and for them in the Hereafter is the punishment of

the Fire. (Qur’an 59:2-3)

28 THe History or Jinaps From MuHAMMAD TO ISIS

PROPHECY OF CONQUEST

After the expulsion of the Qaynuqa and Nadir Jews from Medina, some
of those who remained approached the Quraysh, offering an alliance
against Muhammad and the Muslims. The Quraysh readily accepted.*
Muhammad, forewarned of this new alliance, had a trench dug around
Medina. During the digging of the trench, Muhammad had visions of
conquering the areas bordering Arabia. One of the earliest Muslims,
Salman the Persian, the story goes, was working on the trench when
he began having trouble with a particularly large rock. “The apostle,”
explained Salman, “who was near at hand, saw me hacking and saw how
difficult the place was. He dropped down into the trench and took the
pick from my hand and gave such a blow that lightning showed beneath
the pick.” The flash of lightning “shot out, illuminating everything be-
tween the two tracts of black stones—that is, Medina’s two tracts of
black stones—like a lamp inside a dark room.” Muhammad shouted the
Islamic cry of victory, “Ailahu akbar,’ and all the Muslims responded
with the same shout.*’ This happened again and then a third time, in
exactly the same way. Finally, Salman asked Muhammad: “O you, dearer
than father or mother, what is the meaning of this light beneath your
pick as you strike?”

The Prophet of Islam responded: “Did you really see that, Salman?
The first means that God has opened up to me the Yaman; the second
Syria and the west; and the third the east.”** Or, according to another
version of the same story: “I struck my first blow, and what you saw
flashed out, so that the palaces of al-Hirah [in what is today southern
Iraq] and al-Madai’in of Kisra [the winter capital of the Sassanian Em-
pire] lit up for me as if they were dogs’ teeth, and Gabriel informed
me that my nation would be victorious over them.” The second blow
illuminated in the same way “the palaces of the pale men in the lands
of the Byzantines,” and the third, “the palaces of San’a”—that is, Ye-
men.” Gabriel promised Muhammad victory over each, repeating three
times: “Rejoice; victory shall come to them!” To this Muhammad replied,
“Praise be to God! The promise of One who is true and faithful! He has
promised us victory after tribulation.”

Decades later, when the countries named in this legend were indeed
conquered by the warriors of jihad, an old Muslim used to say: “Conquer

CHapPpTEeR ONE 29

where you will, by God, you have not conquered and to the resurrection
day you will not conquer a city whose keys God had not given before-
hand to Muhammad.”

As the Quraysh, along with another tribe, the Ghatafan (known
collectively in Islamic tradition as “the Confederates”), laid siege to Me-
dina, the trench prevented their breaking through and entering the city,
but the Muslims were unable to force them to end the siege. Mean-
while, the Banu Qurayza began collaborating with the Quraysh. As the
siege dragged on (it lasted three weeks), the Muslims’ situation grew
more perilous, Conditions got so bad that one Muslim remarked bitter-
ly about Muhammad's territorial ambitions and his designs on the two
great powers that bordered Arabia, the Persian Empire of Chosroes and
the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire of Caesar: “Muhammad used to
promise us that we should eat the treasures of Chosroes and Caesar and
today not one of us can feel safe in going to the privy!”*!

The Qurayzah agreed to attack the Muslims from one side while
the Quraysh besieged them from the other. But then events took a turn
for the Muslims. A strong wind blew up around this time, making it
impossible for the Quraysh to keep their tents up or fires going. Abu
Sufyan had had enough. He said to his men: “O Quraysh, we are not in
a permanent camp; the horses and camels are dying; the [Banu] Quray-
za have broken their word to us and we have heard disquieting reports
of them. You can see the violence of the wind which leaves us neither
cooking-pots, nor fire, nor tents to count on. Be off, for 1 am going!””’
The Quraysh began to abandon their positions around Medina. Islam
was saved.

MASSACRING THE JEWS

After the successful resolution of the Battle of the Trench, the angel
Gabriel himself made sure that Muhammad settled accounts with the
Qurayzah Jews. According to Aisha, “When Allah’s Messenger returned
on the day [of the battle] of Al-Khandaq [Trench], he put down his
arms and took a bath. Then Jibril [Gabriel] whose head was covered
with dust, came to him saying, “You have put down your arms! By Allah,
I have not put down my arms yet.’ Allah’s Messenger said, “Where [to go

30 Tue History oF JikAD:*FROM MuHAMMAD TO ISIS

now]? Jibril said, ‘This way,’ pointing towards the tribe of Bani Quraiza.
So Allah’s Messenger went out towards them.””*

As his armies approached the fortifications of the Qurayzah, Mu-
hammad addressed them in terms that have become familiar usage for
Islamic jihadists when speaking of Jews today—language that, as we
have seen, also made its way into the Qur’an: “You brothers of mon-
keys, has God disgraced you and brought His vengeance upon you?” The
Qur’an in three places (2:62-65, 5:59-60, and 7:166) says that Allah
transformed the Sabbath-breaking Jews into pigs and monkeys.

The Qurayzah Jews tried to soften Muhammad's wrath, saying: “O
Abu’l-Qasim [Muhammad], you are not a barbarous person.” But the
Prophet of Islam was in no mood to be appeased. He told the Muslims
who were with him that a warrior who passed by on a white mule was
actually Gabriel, who had “been sent to Banu Qurayza to shake their
castles and strike terror to their hearts.” The Muslims laid siege to the
Qurayzah strongholds for twenty-five days, until, according to [bn Ish-
aq, ‘they were sore pressed” and, as Muhammad had warned, “God cast
terror into their hearts.”*4

After the Qurayzah surrendered, Muhammad decided to put the
fate of the tribe into the hands of the Muslim warrior Said ibn Mu’adh.
Sad pronounced: “I give the judgment that their warriors should be
killed and their children and women should be taken as captives.”

The Prophet of Islam was pleased. “O Sa‘d! You have judged amongst
them with [or, similar to] the judgment of the King [Allah].” He con-
firmed Sa‘d's judgment as that of Allah himself: “You have decided in
confirmation to the judgment of Allah above the seven heavens.” Sa'd’s
sentence was duly carried out, with Muhammad himeelf actively partic-
ipating. According to Ibn Ishaq, “The apostle went out to the market of
Medina [which is still its market today] and dug trenches in it. Then he
sent for [the men of the Qurayzah] and struck off their heads in those
trenches as they were brought out to him in batches.” One of the Proph-
et’s fiercest enemies among the Qurayzah, Huyayy, proclaimed: “God's
command is right. A book and a decree, and massacre have been written
against the Sons of Israel.” Then Muhammad struck off his head.

Sad’s judgment had been to kill the men and enslave the women
and children; one of the captives, Attiyah al-Qurazi, explained how the

CHAPTER ONE 3]

Muslims determined who was a man and who wasn't: “Il was among the
captives of Banu Qurayzah. They [the companions] examined us, and
those who had begun to grow hair [pubes] were killed, and those who
had not were not killed. | was among those who had not grown hair.”””

Ibn Ishaq puts the number of those massacred at “Six hundred or
seven hundred in all, though some put the figure as high as eight hun-
dred or nine hundred.”** Ibn Sa‘d said, “They were between six hundred
and seven hundred in number.” As the Qurayzah were being led to
Muhammad in groups, someone asked Ka’b bin Asad what was happen-
ing. “Will you never understand?” replied the distraught leader of the
Qurayzah. “Don’t you see that the summoner never stops and those who
are taken away do not return? By Allah it is death!”

Allah also sent down a revelation referring obliquely to the mas-
sacre: “And He brought down those who supported them among the
People of the Book from their fortresses and cast terror into their hearts.
A party you lulled, and you took captive a party.” (Qur'an 33:26) Allah
again claimed sole responsibility for the victory: “O you who have be-
lieved, remember the favor of Allah upon you when armies came to you
and We sent upon them a wind and armies you did not see. And Allah
ever sees what you do, when they came at you from above you and from
below you, and when eyes shifted and hearts reached the throats and you
assumed about Allah assumptions. There the believers were tested and
shaken with a severe shaking.” (Qur’an 33:9-11).

THE MUSLIMS TAKE SEX SLAVES

Meanwhile, Muhammad’s cool head and trust in Allah when things
looked bleakest for the Muslims stood him in good stead. Allah gave
him a revelation, telling the Muslims to imitate him: “There has certain-
ly been for you in the Messenger of Allah an excellent pattern for anyone
whose hope is in Allah and the Last Day and remembers Allah often.”
(Qur’an 33:21)

Muhammad was now the undisputed master of Medina, and the
Prophet of Islam enjoyed an immediate economic advantage. A ad-
ith records that “people used to give some of their date-palms to the
Prophet [as a gift], till he conquered Bani Quraiza and Bani An-Nadir,

32 THe History oF JIHAD: From MunammMaAp TO ISIS

whereupon he started returning their favours.”*! But challengers to his
consolidation of power over all Arabia remained. He received word that
the Banu al-Mustaliq, an Arab tribe related to the Quraysh, were gath-
ering against the Muslims, so he led the Muslims out to attack them.
And Allah, according to Ibn Ishaq, “put the [Banu] al-Mustaliq to flight
and killed some of them and gave the apostle their wives, children and
property as booty.”®

There were, according to Muslim warrior Abu Sa’id al-Khadri, “some
excellent Arab women” among the captives of the Banu al-Mustaliq.
“We desired them, for we were suffering from the absence of our wives,
{but at the same time] we also desired ransom for them.” The Qur’an
permitted them to have sexual intercourse with slave girls captured in
battle—“those captives whom your right hands possess” (4:24)—but if
they intended to keep the women as slaves, they couldn't collect ransom
money for them. “So,” Abu Sa’id explained, “we decided to have sexual
intercourse with them but by observing az/’—that is, coitus interruptus.
Muhammad, however, told them this was not necessary: “It does not
matter if you do not do it, for every soul that is to be born up to the Day
of Resurrection will be born.”* Conceptions and births were up to Allah
alone. The enslavement and rape of the women were taken for granted.

THE TREATY OF HUDAYBIYYA

In 628, Muhammad and the Quraysh commenced a ten-year truce (Aud-
na) with the treaty of Hudaybiyya. Muhammad wanted to make the
pilgrimage to Mecca, and he was willing to make concessions to the
Quraysh to be allowed to do so. When the time came for the agreement
to be written, Muhammad called for one of his earliest and most fer-
vent followers, Ali ibn Abi Talib, and told him to write, “In the name of
Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful.” But the Quraysh negotiator,
Suhayl bin Amr, stopped him: “I do not recognize this; but write ‘In thy
name, O Allah.” Muhammad told Ali to write what Suhayl had directed.

When Muhammad directed Ali to continue by writing, “This is
what Muhammad, the apostle of God, has agreed with Suhayl bin Amr,”
Suhayl protested again. “If I witnessed that you were God’s apostle,”
Suhayl told Muhammad, “I would not have fought you. Write your own

CHAPTER ONE 33

name and the name of your father.” Again, Muhammad told Ali to write
the document as Suhayl wished.
The treaty that was finally agreed to read this way:

This is what Muhammad b. Abdullah has agreed with Su-
hay! b. ‘Amr: they have agreed to lay aside war for ten years
during which men can be safe and refrain from hostilities
on condition that if anyone comes to Muhammad without
the permission of his guardian he will return him to them;
and if anyone of those with Muhammad comes to Quraysh
they will not return him to him. We will not show enmity
one to another and there shall be no secret reservation or
bad faith. He who wishes to enter into a bond and agree-
ment with Muhammad may do so and he who wishes to
enter into a bond and agreement with Quraysh may do so.

The Quraysh added: “You must retire from us this year and not enter
Mecca against our will, and next year we will make way for you and you
can enter it with your companions and stay there three nights. You may
carry a riders weapons, the swords in their sheaths. You can bring in
nothing more.”**

Muhammad shocked his men by agreeing that those fleeing the
Quraysh and seeking refuge with the Muslims would be returned to
the Quraysh, while those fleeing the Muslims and seeking refuge with the
Quraysh would not be returned to the Muslims.

Muhammad insisted that the Muslims had been victorious despite
all appearances to the contrary, and Allah confirmed this view in a new
revelation: “Indeed, We have given you a clear conquest.” (Qur'an 48:1)
As if in compensation, Allah promised new spoils to the Muslims: “Cer-
tainly was Allah pleased with the believers when they pledged allegiance
to you under the tree, and He knew what was in their hearts, so He
sent down tranquillity upon them and rewarded them with an imminent
conquest and much war booty which they will take. And ever is Allah
Exalted in Might and Wise. Allah has promised you much booty that
you will take and has hastened this for you and withheld the hands of
people from you—that it may be a sign for the believers and He may
guide you to a straight path.” (Qur’an 48:18-20)

34 THE History oF JIHAD: FROM MuHAMMAD To ISIS

Soon after this promise was made, a Quraysh woman, Umm Kuithum,
joined the Muslims in Medina; her two brothers came to Muhammad,
asking that she be returned “in accordance with the agreement between
him and the Quraysh at Hudaybiya.”® But Muhammad refused. He was
following Allah’s orders: “O you who have believed, when the believing
women come to you as emigrants, examine them. Allah is most knowing
as to their faith. And if you know them to be believers, then do not return
them to the disbelievers; they are not lawful for them, nor are they lawful
for them.” This odd locution is generally understood as meaning that nei-
ther wives nor husbands are lawful for the disbelievers.

The passage continues: “But give the disbelievers what they have
spent. And there is no blame upon you if you marry them when you have
given them their due compensation. And hold not to marriage bonds
with disbelieving women, but ask for what you have spent and let them
ask for what they have spent. That is the judgment of Allah; He judges
between you. And Allah is Knowing and Wise.” (Qur'an 60:10)

In refusing to send Umm Kulthum back to the Quraysh, Muham-
mad broke the treaty, claiming that the treaty stipulated that the Mus-
lims would return to the Quraysh any man who came to them, not any
woman.*° However, Muhammad soon began to accept men from the
Quraysh as well, thus definitively breaking the treaty.®’ The breaking of
the treaty in this way would reinforce the principle that nothing was
good except what was advantageous to Islam, and nothing evil except
what hindered Islam.

THE KHAYBAR RAID

Allah had promised the Muslims disgruntled by the Treaty of Hu-
daybiyya “much booty” (Qur’an 48:19). To fulfill this promise, Mu-
hammad led them against the Khaybar oasis, which was inhabited by
Jews—many of them exiles from Medina. One of the Muslims later
remembered: “When the apostle raided a people he waited until the
morning. If he heard a call to prayer he held back; if he did not hear it
he attacked. We came to Khaybar by night, and the apostle passed the
night there; and when morning came he did not hear the call to prayer,
so he rode and we rode with him.... We met the workers of Khaybar

CHAPTER ONE a5

coming out in the morning with their spades and baskets. When they
saw the apostle and the army they cried, ‘Muhammad with his force,’
and turned tail and fled. The apostle said, ‘Allah Akbar! Khaybar is
destroyed. When we arrive in a people’s square it is a bad morning for
those who have been warned.”

The Muslim advance was inexorable. “The apostle,” according to
Ibn Ishaq, “seized the property piece by piece and conquered the forts
”6° Ibn Said reports that the battle was
fierce: the “polytheists...killed a large number of [Muhammad’s] Com-
panions and he also put to death a very large number of them.... He
killed ninety-three men of the Jews.””? Muhammad and his men offered
the fajr prayer, the Islamic dawn prayer, before it was light, and then

one by one as he came to them.

entered Khaybar itself. The Muslims immediately set out to locate the
inhabitants’ wealth. A Jewish leader of Khaybar, Kinana bin al-Rabi, was
brought before Muhammad; Kinana was supposed to have been entrust-
ed with the treasure of the Banu Nadir. Kinana denied knowing where
this treasure was, but Muhammad pressed him: “Do you know that if we
find you have it I shall kill you?” Kinana said yes, that he did know that.

Some of the treasure was found. To find the rest, Muhammad gave
orders concerning Kinana: “Torture him until you extract what he has.”
One of the Muslims built a fire on Kinana’s chest, but Kinana would not
give up his secret. When he was at the point of death, Muhammad bin
Maslama, killer of the poet Ka’b bin Al-Ashraf, beheaded him.”

Muhammad agreed to let the people of Khaybar go into exile, allow-
ing them, as he had the Banu Nadir, to keep as much of their property as
they could carry.” The Prophet of Islam, however, commanded them to
leave behind all of their gold and silver.“ He had intended to expel all of
them, but some farmers begged him to let them stay if they gave him half
their yield annually.** Muhammad agreed: “T will allow you to continue
here, so long as we would desire.””* He warned them: “If we wish to expel
you we will expel you.” They no longer had any rights that did not de-
pend upon the goodwill and sufferance of Muhammad and the Muslims.
And indeed, when the Muslims discovered some treasure that some of the
Khaybar Jews had hidden, he ordered the women of the tribe enslaved and
seized the perpetrators’ land.” A Aadith notes that “the Prophet had their
warriors killed, their offspring and woman taken as captives.”””

36 THe History oF JIHAD: From MuyHAMMAD TO ISIS

During the caliphate of Umar (634-644), the Jews who remained at
Khaybar were banished to Syria, and the rest of their land was seized.”
To this day, Muslims warn Jews of impending massacres by chanting,
“Khaybar, Khaybar. O Jews, the army of Muhammad will return.”

MUHAMMAD'S SEX SLAVE

One of the Muslim warriors, Dihya ibn Khalifa, came to Muhammad
and said: “O Allah’s Prophet! Give me a slave girl from the captives.”
The Prophet of Islam was agreeable, telling Dihya: “Go and take any
slave girl.” Dihya chose a woman named Safiyya bint Huyayy.” Safiyya
was the daughter of Huyayy bin Akhtab, who had induced the Banu
Qurayzah Jews to repudiate their alliance with Muhammad. Muham-
mad had killed Huyayy along with the rest of the men of the Qurayzah.
Safiyya’s husband was Kinana ibn Rabi, who had just been tortured and
killed by the warriors of jihad. Once captured herself, she had won the
admiration of the warriors of Islam, who told their prophet: “We have
not seen the like of her among the captives of war.”*’ One man added:
“© Allah’s Messenger! You gave Safiyya bint Huyai to Dihya and she is
the chief-mistress of [the ladies] of the tribes of Quraiza and An-Nadir,
she befits none but you.”*

Muhammad accordingly called for Dihya and Safiyya. When the
Prophet of Islam saw Safiyya, he told Dihya: “Take any slave girl other
than her from the captives.” Muhammad then immediately freed her
and married her himself—since she agreed to convert to Islam, she was
able to be elevated beyond the position of a slave. That night Safiyya was
dressed as a bride, and a wedding feast was hastily arranged. On the way
out of Khaybar that night, Muhammad halted his caravan as soon as they
were outside the oasis, pitched a tent, and consummated the marriage.
Safiyya went from being the wife of a Jewish chieftain to being the wife
of the man who murdered her father and husband in a single day.

CHAPTER ONE Bi

TAKING MECCA

Muhammad then marched on Mecca with an army of, according to some
reports, ten thousand Muslims.** When the Meccans saw the size of
their force, which Muhammad exaggerated by ordering his men to build
many extra fires during the night as his men were assembled outside
the city, they knew that all was lost. Many of the most notable Quraysh
warriors now deserted and, converting to Islam, joined Muhammad’s
forces. As they advanced, they were met by Abu Sufyan himself, who
had opposed Muhammad bitterly as a leader of the Quraysh; but now
Abu Sufyan wanted to become a Muslim. Allowed into Muhammad's

presence, Abu Sufyan recited a poem that included these lines:

I was like one going astray in the darkness of the night,

But now I am led on the right track.

I could not guide myself, and he who with God overcame me
Was he whom I had driven away with all my might.

According to Ibn Ishaq, when he got to the lines “he who with God
overcame me / Was he whom I had driven away with all my might,”
Muhammad “punched him in the chest and said, “You did indeed!’
But when Muhammad said, “Woe to you, Abu Sufyan, isn’t it time that
you recognize that I am God's apostle?” Abu Sufyan replied, “As to that
I still have some doubt.””

At that, one of Muhammad’s lieutenants, Abbas, said to Abu Su-
fyan: “Submit and testify that there is no God but Allah and that Mu-
hammad is the apostle of God before you lose your head.” Abu Sutyan
complied.’

When Muhammad “forced his entry” into Mecca, according to Ibn
Said, “the people embraced Islam willingly or unwillingly."* The Prophet
of Islam ordered the Muslims to fight only those individuals or groups
who resisted their advance into the city—except for a list of people who

were to be killed, even if they had sought sanctuary in the Ka’bah itself.”

38 Tue History oF JinAD: FRoM MuuHammap To ISIS

CONSOLIDATING POWER IN ARABIA

Muhammad was the master of Mecca, but there was one additional great
obstacle between him and mastery of all Arabia. Malik ibn Awf, a mem-
ber of the Thagif tribe of the city of Taif, south of Mecca, began to
assemble a force to fight the Muslims. The people of Ta’if had rejected
Muhammad and treated him shabbily when he presented his prophet-
ic claim to them ten years earlier. They had always been rivals of the
Quraysh and viewed the conversion of the latter to Islam with disdain.
Malik assembled a force and marched out to face the Muslims; Muham-
mad met him with an army twelve thousand strong, saying, “We shall
not be worsted today for want of numbers.””

The two forces met at a wadi—a dry riverbed—called Hunayn, near
Mecca. Malik and his men arrived first and took up positions that gave
them an immense tactical advantage. The Muslims, despite their supe-
rior numbers, were routed. As they broke ranks and fled, Muhammad
called out: “Where are you going, men? Come to me. I am Ged’s apostle.
IT am Muhammad the son of Abdullah.””! Some of the Muslims did take
heart, and gradually the tide began to turn—although with tremendous
loss of life on both sides.

The Muslims eventually prevailed, wiping out the last major force
that stood between the Prophet of Islam and mastery of Arabia. After
the battle, Muhammad received another revelation explaining that the
Muslims had won because of supernatural help:

Allah has already given you victory in many regions and on
the day of Hunayn, when your great number pleased you,
but it did not avail you at all, and the earth was confin-
ing for you with its vastness; then you turned back, fleeing.
Then Allah sent down His tranquility upon His Messenger
and upon the believers and sent down soldier angels whom
you did not see and punished those who disbelieved. And
that is the recompense of the disbelievers. Then Allah will
accept repentance after that for whom He wills; and Allah
is Forgiving and Merciful. (Qur’an 9:25-27)

CHAPTER ONE 39

With Malik defeated, the Muslims later conquered Ta’if with little re-
sistance. On his way into the city, Muhammad stopped under a tree and,
finding the area to his liking, sent word to the owner of the property:
“Either come out or we will destroy your wall.” The owner refused to
appear before Muhammad, so the Muslims indeed destroyed his proper-
ty.”> Endeavoring, however, to win the tribesmen of Ta’if to Islam, Mu-
hammad was lenient toward them. In his distribution of the booty, he
likewise favored some of the recent converts among the Quraysh, hop-
ing to cement their allegiance to Islam. His favoritism, however, led to
grumbling. One Muslim approached him boldly: “Muhammad, I’ve seen
what you have done today...I don’t think you have been just.”

The Prophet of Islam replied incredulously: “If justice is not to be
found with me then where will you find it?”™

CALLING THE WORLD TO ISLAM

Muhammad was determined to extend that justice to the world.-Islamic
tradition holds that he wrote to Heraclius, the Eastern Roman emperor
in Constantinople:

In the name of Allah, the most Gracious, the Most Mer-
ciful. [This letter is] from Muhammad, the slave of Allah,
and His Messenger, to Heraclius, the ruler of the Byzan-
tines. Peace be upon him, who follows the [true] guidance.
Now then, I invite you to Islam [that is, surrender to Al-
lah], embrace Islam and you will be safe; embrace Islam
and Allah will bestow on you a double reward. But if you
reject this invitation of Islam, you shall be responsible for
misguiding the peasants [that is, your nation].*

Then the letter quoted the Qur’an: “Say, ‘O People of the Book, come to
a common word between us and you—that we will not worship except
Allah and not associate anything with Him and not take one another as
lords instead of Allah.’ But if they turn away, then say, ‘Bear witness that
we are Muslims.” (3:64).

The letter contains a clear threat: “embrace Islam and you will be
safe.” Presumably, then, Heraclius and his people would not be safe if

40 Tue History of JinapD: From MunHamMapD To ISIS

they did not embrace Islam. Heraclius, of course, did not accept Islam,
and soon the Byzantines would know well that the warriors of jihad in-
deed granted no safety to those who made such a choice.

Muhammad sent a similar letter to Khosrau, the ruler of the Persians.
After reading the letter of the Prophet of Islam, Khosrau contemptuous-
ly tore it to pieces. When news of this reached Muhammad, he called
upon Allah to tear the Persian emperor and his followers to pieces.”° He
told his followers that they would enjoy the fruits of jihad victories over
both Heraclius and Khosrau: “When Khosrau perishes, there will be no
[more] Khosrau after him, and when Caesar perishes, there will be no
more Caesar after him. By Him in Whose hands Muhammad's life is,
you will spend the treasures of both of them in Allah’s Cause.”””

JIHAD AGAINST THE CHRISTIANS

Allah gave Muhammad a revelation commanding Muslims to fight even
against Jews and Christians until they accepted Islamic hegemony, sym-
bolized by payment of a poll tax (jizya) and discriminatory regulations
that would ensure that they would be constantly reminded of their sub-
ordinate position: “Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last
Day, nor hold that forbidden which has been forbidden by Allah and
His Messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of truth, of the People
of the Book, until they pay the jizya with willing submission, and feel
themselves subdued.” (Qur’an 9:29)

He told his followers to offer these unbelievers conversion to Islam,
as he had offered to the rulers, and if they refused, to offer them the op-
portunity to pay tribute as vassals of the Islamic state, and if they refused
that also, to go to war:

Fight in the name of Allah and in the way of Allah. Fight
against those who disbelieve in Allah. Make a holy war,
do not embezzle the spoils; do not break your pledge; and
do not mutilate [the dead] bodies; do not kill the children.
When you meet your enemies who are polytheists, invite
them to three courses of action. If they respond to any one
of these, you also accept it and withhold yourself from do-

CHAPTER ONE 41

ing them any harm. Invite them to [accept] Islam; if they
respond to you, accept it from them and desist from fight-
ing against them.... If they refuse to accept Islam, demand
from them the Jizya. If they agree to pay, accept it from
them and hold off your hands. If they refuse to pay the tax,
seek Allah’s help and fight them.”

After commanding his followers to make war against Christians,
Muhammad resolved to set an example for his followers by doing just
that. In 631, he ordered the Muslims to begin preparations for a raid on
the Byzantine Empire, at its northern Arabia garrison at Tabuk. The
journey across the desert sands in the height of summer was arduous, and
when Muhammad and his large Muslim force arrived at the Byzantine
holdings in northwestern Arabia, they found that the Byzantine troops
had withdrawn rather than trying to engage them.

On the way back, Allah gave Muhammad revelations scolding the
Muslims who had declined to go along on the expedition. Allah remind-
ed the Muslims that their first duty was to him and his prophet, and that
those who refused to wage jihad would face terrible punishment:

O you who have believed, what is with you that, when you
are told to go forth in the cause of Allah, you adhere heavily
to the earth? Are you satisfied with the life of this world
rather than the Hereafter? But what is the enjoyment of
worldly life compared to the Hereafter except a little. If you
do not go forth, He will punish you with a painful punish-
ment and will replace you with another people, and you will
not harm Him at all. And Allah is over all things compe-
tent. (Qur’an 9:38-39)

Not that Muhammad needed their help, of course, because he had Allah
on his side:

If you do not aid the Prophet, Allah has already aided him
when those who disbelieved had driven him out as one of
two, when they were in the cave and he said to his com-
panion, “Do not grieve; indeed Allah is with us.” And Al-
lah sent down his tranquility upon him and supported him

42 Tue History oF JIHAD: From MuHammapD To ISIS

with angels you did not see and made the word of those
who disbelieved the lowest, while the word of Allah, that
is the highest. And Allah is Exalted in Might and Wise.
(Qur’an 9:40)

THE PREEMINENCE OF JIHAD

Nonetheless, to go forth in jihad for the sake of Allah (jzhad ft sabil Allah,
which denotes in Islamic theology armed struggle to establish the hege-
mony of the Islamic social order) is the best deed a Muslim can perform:

Go forth, whether light or heavy, and strive with your
wealth and your lives in the cause of Allah. That is better
for you, if you only knew. (Qur’an 9:41)

The Prophet of Islam emphasized this on many occasions. Once a man
asked him, “Guide me to such a deed as equals Jihad [in reward].”
Muhammad answered: “I do not find such a deed.””
Allah told Muhammad that the true Muslims did not hesitate to
wage jihad, even to the point of risking their property and their very
lives. The ones who refused to do this weren't even believers at all:

Those who believe in Allah and the Last Day would not
ask permission of you to be excused from striving with
their wealth and their lives. And Allah is Knowing of those
who fear Him. Only those would ask permission of you
who do not believe in Allah and the Last Day and whose
hearts have doubted, and they, in their doubt, are hesitating.
(Qur'an 9:44—-45)

This “striving with their wealth and their lives” was, in the context
of Muhammad's circumstances, unmistakably a military command—
particularly in light of the fact that Allah was guaranteeing Paradise to
those who would “fight in the way of Allah and shall slay and be slain”
(Qur'an 9:111)—the Arabic word for “striving” being a form of the word
Jthad.” On another occasion he said: “I have been commanded to fight

CHAPTER ONE 43

against people, till they testify to the fact that there is no god but Allah,
and believe in me [that] I am the messenger [from the Lord] and in all
that I have brought. And when they do it, their blood and riches are
guaranteed protection on my behalf except where it is justified by law,
and their affairs rest with Allah." The obverse was also true: if they did
not become Muslims, their blood and riches would not be guaranteed
any protection from the Muslims.

“IF YOU ACCEPT ISLAM
YOU WILL BE SAFE”

Muhammad was now the undisputed master of Arabia. The Arabian
rulers and tribes that had not yet submitted to his authority now began
to journey to Medina to accept his religion and pay him homage. To the
lands of those who did not come, Muhammad sent jihad warriors. He
sent the fearsome fighter Khalid bin al-Walid to the al-Harith tribe, in-
structing him to call them to accept Islam three days before he attacked
them, and to call off the battle if they converted. Khalid duly told the
tribe leaders: “If you accept Islam you will be safe”—whereupon the tribe
converted. Khalid notified the Prophet of Islam and sent a deputation
from the tribe to Medina to see Muhammad, who told them: “If Khalid
had not written to me that you had accepted Islam and had not fought I
would throw your heads beneath your feet.”

From Himyar in south Arabia came a letter informing Muham-
mad that the kings of the region had accepted Islam and waged war
in Allah’s name against the remaining pagans in the area. Muhammad
was pleased, sending them a response informing them that “your mes-
senger reached me on my return from the land of the Byzantines and
he met us in Medina and conveyed your message and your news and
informed us of your Islam and of your killing the polytheists. God has
guided you with His guidance.”

He detailed their obligations as Muslims and directed that Jews
and Christians in their domains should be invited to convert to Islam,
but if they refused, they were “not to be turned” from their religions.

44 THe History or JIHAD: From MuxHamMAD TO ISIS

Rather, the Jew or Christian in these newly Muslim lands “must pay
the poll tax—for every adult, male or female, free or slave, one full di-
nar’—and he gave instructions for how that amount—“or its equivalent
in clothes”——was to be calculated. He reminded the kings that the lives
of the Jews and Christians depended on their payment of this tax: “He
who pays that to God’s apostle has the guarantee of God and His apos-
tle, and he who withholds it is the enemy of God and His apostle."
Ultimately the Prophet of Islam determined that Jews and Chris-
tians would no longer be allowed in Arabia at all. “I will expel the Jews
and Christians from the Arabian Peninsula,” he told his companions,
“and will not leave any but Muslims.” He gave just such an order on

his deathbed.

THE IMPORTANCE OF THE JIZYA

The jizya tax was so important because, besides raiding, which produced
inconsistent results, it was the Muslims’ chief source of income. This
is clear in a letter Muhammad sent to a Jewish tribe, the Banu Janbah.
He assured them that “under the guarantee of Allah and the guarantee
of His Apostle there will be no cruelty or oppression on you. Verily, the
Apostle of Allah will defend you.” However: “Verily, for the Apostle of
Allah will be the booty which you receive on making peace [with some
party] and every slave you get, as well as animals and other objects, except
that which the Apostle of Allah or his envoy remits. Verily, it is binding
on you to pay one-fourth of the yield of your date-palms, and one-fourth
of your game from the rivers, and one-fourth of what your women spin.”
But that was all: “besides that you will be exempt from j1zyah and forced
labour.”!™ Likewise, to a Christian ruler Muhammad wrote:

I will not fight against you unless I write to you in advance.
So, join the fold of Islam or pay the sizyah. Obey Allah and
His Apostle and the messengers of His Apostle, honour
them and dress them in nice clothes.... Provide Zayd with
good clothes. If my messengers will be pleased with you, I
shall also be pleased with you.... Pay three wasag of barley
to Harmalah...*”

CHAPTER ONE 45

The onerous tax burdens that Jews and Christians in Muslim domains
bore simply for the privilege of being allowed to live in relative peace
would become the key source of income for the great Islamic empires
that carried Muhammad's jihad into Africa, Europe, and Asia. The
dhimmis (or zimmis) were the “protected people” in the Islamic state,
who paid the jizya and accepted discrimination and humiliation in ex-
change for permission to remain in their ancestral religions rather than
convert to Islam.

MUHAMMAD'S BATTLES

Muhammad, according to Islamic tradition, died in 632. Ibn Ishaq re-
ports that he had participated in twenty-seven battles. The parenthetical
material below beginning with “T.” refers to the version of the same
material as recorded by another Muslim historian, Tabari.

The apostle took part personally in twenty-seven. ..raids:

Waddan which was the raid of al-Abwa’.

Buwat in the direction of Radwa. ‘Ushayra in the valley of Yan-
bu’.

The first fight at Badr in pursuit of Kurz b. Jabir.

The great battle of Badr in which God slew the chiefs of
Quraysh (T. and their nobles and captured many).

Banu Sulaym until he reached al-Kudr.

Al-Sawig in pursuit of Abu, Sufyan b. Harb (T. until he reached
Qarqara al-Kudr).

Ghatafan (T. towards Najd), which is the raid of Dhu Amarr.
Bahran, a mine in the Hijaz (T. above al-Furu’).

Uhud.

Hamra'u'1-Asad.

Banu Nadir.

Dhatu’l-Riga’ of Nakhl.

The last battle of Badr.

Dumatu'l-Jandal.

Aj-Khandaq.

46

THe History oF JIHAD: From MuyHammMapb TO ISIS

Banul Qurayza.

Banu Lihyan of Hudhayl. Dhu Qarad. Banu’l-Mustaliq of
Khuza’a.

Al-Hudaybiya not intending to fight where the polytheists
opposed his passage.

Khaybar.

Then he went on the accomplished pilgrimage.

The occupation of Mecca.

Hunayn.

Al-Taif.

Tabuk.

In truth, he actually fought in nine engagements: Badr; Uhud;

al-Khandaq; Qurayza; al-Mustaliq; Khaybar; the occupation [of
Mecca]; Hunayn; and al-Ta’if.1©

PDF created by Rajesh Arya - Gujarat

CHAPTER TWO

THE AGE OF THE
GREAT CONQUESTS

Jthad in the Seventh Century

Shortly after the generally accepted date of Muhammad's death, 632, the
Arab armies swept out of Arabia with immense force and embarked upon
a series of conquests unparalleled in human history for their rapidity and
scope. In detailing what happened, early historians contradict one another
on numerous particulars, such that no reliable sequence of events can be de-
finitively established, but there is no doubt that the two great world powers
of the day, the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire and the Persian Empire,
suffered a series of staggering defeats, and by the end of the seventh century,
the Arab invaders had amassed a huge empire of their own. Sassanid Persia
was conquered altogether, and the Eastern Roman Empire was substantially
reduced in size and placed in a state of ongoing siege, a state it would endure
for the next seven hundred years.

These conquests began during what Muslim scholars generally re-
gard as the first Islamic Golden Age, the period of the “Rightly-Guided
Caliphs,” Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman, and Ali. Spanning 632 to 661, this
period is held up to this day as the quintessential example of what an
Islamic state is and ought to be.

It was anything but peaceful.

THE FIRST CALIPHATE CONTROVERSY

When Muhammad died, who should lead the nascent Muslim com-
munity was by no means clear. One party of the believers insisted that

48 Tue History oF Jinap: From MunamMap To ISIS

Muhammad had chosen Ali ibn Abi Talib, his son-in-law (the husband
of Muhammad’s daughter Fatima) and one of his earliest followers, to
succeed him. They presented as evidence a tradition in which Muham-
mad asked Ali, “Aren't you satisfied with being unto me what Aaron was
unto Moses?”? The Qur’an depicts Moses saying to Aaron, “Take my
place among my people” (7:142), so this meant, they argued, that Ali was
to be Muhammad’s successor (&Aa/ifa, or caliph).

Not everyone was convinced. Aisha, Muhammad's youngest and
favorite wife, waved away Ali’s claim to be Muhammad's successor by
invoking her own closeness to the prophet in his dying moments, When,
she asked, did Muhammad appoint Ali his successor? “Verily, when he
died he was resting against my chest [or, in my lap] and he asked for a
washbasin and then collapsed while in that state, and I could not even
perceive that he had died, so when did he appoint him by will?”? She
produced her own quotation from Muhammad regarding who should
become the leader of the believers: “It is not befitting that a group,
among whom is Abu Bakr, be led by other than him.” (This is, however,
classified as a “weak” hadith, meaning that its authenticity is doubted.)

Meanwhile, the ansar (helpers), that is, those who became Muslim
after Muhammad’s Aijrah to Medina, asserted that there should now be
two rulers, one for them and one for the muhajiroun (emigrants), those
from among the Quraysh tribe who had become Muslim in Mecca
before the Aijrah. The ansar chose one of their own, Sa'd ibn Ubadah,
as their leader, but one of the amsar argued that there should be one
ruler, and that ruler should be from among the muhajiroun: “In truth
Muhammad was from Quraysh, and his people are more entitled...and
more suitable.”

This was no staid gathering of courtly parliamentarians. The an-
sar, convinced that the muhajiroun should lead, rushed to swear their
allegiance to Abu Bakr; in the excitement, Sa’d ibn Ubadah, who still
refused allegiance, was pushed to the ground. Some of his followers ex-
claimed: “Be careful not to step on Sa’d!”5

At that, Umar, one of the muhajiroun and a fierce partisan of Abu
Bakr, cried out, “Kill him! May God slay him!” He stepped on Sa’d’s head
and snarled: “I intend to tread upon you until your arm is dislocated.”
Sad, though caught on the ground, spat back: “By God, if you remove a

CHAPTER Two 49

single hair from it you'll return with no front teeth in your mouth.” But
then Abu Bakr urged Umar to show compassion—after all, Sa’d had a
following that Abu Bakr wanted to bring into his fold—and a measure
of calm was restored.®

Abu Bakr was one of Muhammad's closest and most fanatical fol-
lowers. When a skeptic had doubted Muhammad’s story about trav-
eling to Jerusalem and then to Paradise on a winged white horse
with a human head, Abu Bakr demonstrated the strength of his de-
votion: “If he says so then it is true. And what is so surprising in that?
He tells me that communications from God from heaven to earth come
to him in an hour of a day or night and I believe him, and that is more
extraordinary than that at which you boggle!”’

But Abu Baktr’s faith wasn’t centered upon Muhammad. When the
prophet of Islam died, Abu Bakr stood before the weeping Muslims and
declared: “Whoever worshipped Muhammad, then Muhammad is dead,
but whoever worshipped Allah, then Allah is alive and shall never die.”

Once he was definitively the caliph, Abu Bakr addressed the Mus-
lims, making sure they knew that he was not claiming to have inherited
Muhammad's prophetic powers: “Oh people, I am just like you...God
chose Muhammad above the worlds and protected him from evils, but I
am only a follower, not an innovator. IfI am upright, then follow me, but
if I deviate, straighten me out.... | have a Satan who takes possession of
me; so when he comes to me, avoid me so I may have no effect on your
hair and your skins”—that is, not harm them.?

Abu Bakr exhorted the Muslims: “Abandon not jihad, when the
people hold back from jihad, they are put to disgrace.”"

THE APOSTASY WARS

Not all the Muslims were impressed. Self-proclaimed prophets, disdain-
ing to be ruled by a mere successor of a prophet, had already arisen all
over Arabia during the time of Muhammad's final illness. After Abu
Bakr became caliph, they rejected not only his authority but Islam itself.
Maslama bin Habib (derisively dubbed “Musaylima” or “little Maslama’”
in Muslim accounts) and his wife Sajah bint al-Harith declared them-
selves to be new prophets in the eastern Arabian oasis of Yamamah. As-

50 THe History oF JiHAD: FROM MunaAMMAD TO ISIS

wad al-Ansi in Yemen and Tulayhah ibn Khuwaylid of the Asad tribe
in north central Arabia announced that they were new prophets as well.
They began demanding the allegiance of those who had been Muslim."

Many of the tribes of Arabia that Muhammad had recently sub-
dued saw in his death their chance to reassert their autonomy. Numer-
ous, and sometimes all, members of every Arab tribe except two—the
Quraysh and the Thaqif—left Islam at this point.!* They declared that
their pledge of allegiance to Muhammad had ended with his death, and
that neither Abu Bakr nor anyone else had any right to claim it. Some
declared that they would maintain Istamic prayers but withhold sadagaA,
the supposedly voluntary alms-giving that was in effect a payment of
tribute to the leaders of the Muslims.

Abu Bakr rejected this proposal. He and his followers countered
that these Arabs had not pledged allegiance to Muhammad as a person
but as a prophet, and that the religion they had embraced still existed.
What’s more, Muhammad himself had mandated that anyone who left
that religion should be put to death: “Whoever changed his Islamic re-
ligion, then kill him."

Abu Bakr sent his most skillful warrior, [Chalid ibn al-Walid, to sub-
due the apostates and bring them back into the fold of Islam. Abu Bakr
gave these instructions to the Muslim armies: “When you come upon
one of the people’s abodes, and then hear the call to prayer in it, desist
from its people until you have asked them for what reason they were
hostile. But if you do not hear the call to prayer, then launch a raid such
that you kill and burn.” He added that if Muslims did not hear a people
make the call to prayer, they had no choice but to “raid them” and “kill
them by every means, by fire or whatever else.” And if they refused to
pay the alms tax, there would be no choice but to “raid them without any
word” of warning."

Khalid carried out his assignment with dispatch, aided by some
skillful diplomacy that turned some of the rebels back to Islam and con-
siderably swelled his ranks. He marched across Arabia subduing the re-
bellious tribes with relative ease, calling people to Islam and killing those
who resisted. '¢

The Muslims captured one of the chieftains of the rebels, Malik ibn
Nuwayrah; Malik made the Islamic profession of faith, but Khalid had

Cuarrer Two 51

him beheaded anyway and took his wife, Umm Tamim bint al-Minhal,
for himself. Back in Medina, the headquarters of Muslims, Abu Bakr’s
lieutenant and eventual successor Umar was incensed. He hurried to
Abu Bakr and raged against Khalid: “The enemy of God transgressed
against a Muslim man, killing him and then leaping upon his wife.”
Abu Bakr kept his counsel.

Khalid returned to Medina as a conquering hero, wearing as a tro-
phy his turban festooned with the apostate arrows that had been shot
at him. But instead of marveling at his valor, Umar in fury pulled the
arrows from his turban and broke them, and raged at Khalid: “What
hypocrisy, to kill a Muslim man and then leap upon his wife! By God, I
would pelt you with stones.”

The Qur'an (which, according even to Muslim accounts, had not
been collected by this time) forbids a Muslim to kill a fellow Muslim
(4:92). In the face of Umar’s anger, Khalid said nothing, but he worried
that Abu Bakr would agree with Umar; however, when granted an au-
dience with the caliph, Khalid found himself pardoned. Abu Bakr ex-
plained to his lieutenant: “Oh Umar, I will not sheathe a sword that God
has drawn against the unbelievers.”

That sword was still needed. The Muslims met the forces of the rival
“prophet” Musaylima at Yamamah. Amid the battle melee, one of the
Muslim commanders made it very clear what the fight was about: “Oh
company of the Muslims, you are the party of God, and they are the par-
ties of Satan.””” The apostates were defeated, and the rebellion collapsed.
It was all over by March 18, 633, just a year after the death of Muham-
mad. Abu Bakr ordered Khalid to have all the adult men of the Banu
Hanifah, a powerful tribe that had supported Musaylima, put to death.

Khalid, however, concluded a treaty with them instead, and pressed
one of the Banu Hanifah chieftains, Mujja’ah: “Give me your daughter
in marriage.” Mujja’ah warned Khalid that he was destroying his reputa-
tion in the eyes of Abu Bakr. Khalid had no patience for this, shouting,
“Marry her to me, man!”2! But Mujja’ah was right: soon a letter arrived
from Abu Bakr, reminding him of the Muslims’ losses in the apostasy
wars: “Upon my life, oh son of Khalid’s mother, are you so free as to mar-
ry women, while in the court of your house is the blood of 1,200 men of
the Muslims that has not yet dried?””

52 THe History OF JIHAD: FROM MuHAMMAD tro ISIS

Khalid thought he detected the influence of his rival, muttering,
“This is the work of the little left-handed man’—that is, Umar. Abu
Bakr’s most notable achievement may have been maintaining an un-
easy peace between the little left-handed man and the great general, as
both played a large role in what was to come next. Umar declared that
Abu Bakr (not Khalid) had “successfully waged the apostasy wars, and
thanks to him, Islam is now supreme in Arabia.”** But the apostasy
wars were simply a process of recapturing what had already been won
for Islam, and then lost again; now the Muslims’ gaze turned outward.
There were many, many more unbelievers outside Arabia than there
had ever been within it, and Khalid would soon unsheathe the sword
of Allah against them.

THE CONQUEST OF IRAQ.

Abu Bakr needed Khalid too much to stay angry with him over his ama-
tory adventures. While his general was still at Yamamah, the caliph sent
him new orders: “Go on toward Iraq until you enter it. Begin with the
gateway to India, which is al-Ubdullah.” Render the people of Persia
[Fars] and those nations under their rule peaceable.”

Iraq was within the domains of Sassanid Persia; it would become the
first land outside of Arabia to experience jihad. Khalid stormed through
the land, defeating the Persians in four initial battles. In May 633, he
reached the city of al-Hirah, the capital of the northern Euphrates re-
gion; its Sassanian governor, Qabisah ibn Iyas, and the noblemen of the
city came to welcome him. Khalid wasted no time explaining why he and
his men were there: “T call you to God and to Islam. If you respond to the
call, then you are Muslims: You obtain the benefits they enjoy and take
up the responsibilities they bear. If you refuse, then [you must pay] the
sizyah. If you refuse the jizyah, I will bring against you tribes of people
who are more eager for death than you are for life. We will then fight you
until God decides between us and you.””” Another account has Khalid
saying, “If you refuse the jizyah, then we will bring against you a people
who love death more than you love drinking wine.”

Qabisah was unprepared for war. “We have no need to fight you,”
he told Khalid. “Rather, we will keep to our religion and pay you the

CHAPTER Two 53

Jjizyah.”” The people of al-Hirah, a Christian stronghold within a Zo-
roastrian empire, agreed to pay the Muslims ninety thousand dirhams.

In presenting Qabisah with this triple choice, Khalid was obeying
the commands of the Qur’an and Muhammad: offer the People of the
Book (Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians) conversion to Islam; subju-
gation under the rule of the Muslims, signified by the payment of the
tax, the sizyah, from which the Muslims were exempt; or war. Given the
paucity of contemporary evidence of Muhammad's life, or of the exis-
tence of the Qur'an before the early eighth century, it is quite possible
that Khalid was the originator of this triple choice, rather than a believer
obediently following the dictates of his prophet; in any case, this choice
became codified in the Qur’an and Islamic law, and remains the primary
stance of Islam toward the People of the Book to this day.

Khalid wrote more harshly to the Sassanian rulers: “From Khalid b.
al-Walid to the rulers of the Persians: Peace be upon whosoever follows
right guidance.”*° This was to become the mandated greeting for Mus-
lims toward non-Muslims; when greeting a fellow Muslim, Muslims
were to say, “Peace be upon you.” But to a non-Muslim, a Muslim was
to wish peace only upon “whoever follows right guidance,” that is, the

Muslims. Khalid continued:

Praise be to God, Who has scattered your servants, wrest-
ed your sovereignty away, and rendered your plotting weak.
Whoever worships the way we worship, faces the direction
we face in prayer, and eats meat slaughtered in our fashion,
that person is a Muslim and obtains the benefits we enjoy
and takes up the responsibilities we bear. Now then, when
you receive this letter, send me hostages and place your-
self under my protection. Otherwise, by Him other than
Whom there is no god, I will most certainly send against
you a people who love death just as you love life.”

The Sassanian rulers soon realized these were not empty words. Kha-
lid stormed through Persia, offering the Persians the same ultimatum:
convert to Islam, pay the jizya, or face war. He defeated the Persians in
numerous battles. At the fortress of Dumah, a force of Christian Arabs
joined the locals in defense against the Muslims; Khalid defeated them

54 Tire History oF JtHAD: From MunammMapD TO ISIS

as easily as he had everyone else, beheaded their commander, and bought
his daughter, who was renowned for her beauty, as a sex slave.*”

In December 633, Khalid arrived at al-Firad, a Persian fortress on
the Sassanians’ border with the other great power of the day, the Byzan-
tine Empire. The Byzantines, seeing the Muslim advances all over Iraq,
decided to aid the Persians against Khalid, even though they had just
fought a series of exhausting wars against each other. The ninth-century
Muslim historian Tabari has the Persians and Byzantines exchanging
intelligence about Khalid: “This is a man who is fighting on the basis
of religion. He has intelligence and knowledge. By God, he will most
definitely be victorious, whereas we will most certainly fail.”*

It is doubtful that seventh-century Roman and Persian commanders
were actually that defeatist, but they were certainly correct that Khalid
was “fighting on the basis of religion.” Everywhere he had gone in Per-
sia, he had called the people to accept Islam or pay the jizya; for Khalid,
the invasion of Persia was an expedition to bring Islam to the Sassanid
Empire, or to subjugate the Zoroastrians and Christians in Persia under
the rule of the Muslims.

The Persians and Byzantines had every reason to be concerned. Kha-
lid told his men: “Press your pursuit of them. Do not grant them any re-
spite.”** The Muslims won a decisive victory; Tabari notes that “the cavalry
commander would corner a group of them with the spears of his men;
having collected them, they would kill them. On the day of al-Firad, one
hundred thousand men were slain in the battle and the pursuit.”

After this, Khalid returned to Arabia and made the pilgrimage to
Mecca, giving thanks to Allah for granting him so many great victories
for Islam. He planned then to return to Persia and complete its conquest,
first by attacking Qadissiyah, a Persian fort that lay between him and the
imperial capital of Ctesiphon. As it turned out, however, he was needed
elsewhere. The Muslim armies had entered Syria, a Byzantine province,
but they were not facing as easy a time of it as Khalid had encountered in
Persia. The Byzantine emperor Heraclius was assembling a massive force
to meet them, and Abu Bakr wasn’t confident that any of the generals
he had in Syria were up to the challenge. But he knew a man who was:
“By Allah,” he exclaimed, “I shall destroy the Romans and the friends of

CHAFTER Two 55

Satan with Khalid Ibn Al Walid.” He ordered Khalid to put his plans
for Persia on hold for the time being and go to Syria.

Khalid did so and his men won battle after battle, reaching Da-
mascus in August 634 and laying siege to it. But then his most import-
ant supporter, the caliph Abu Bakr, fell mortally ill. Tabari says it was
the handiwork of those whom the Qur'an designates (at 5:82) to be the
worst enemies of the Muslims: “The cause of his death was that the Jews
fed him poison in a grain of rice; it is also said in porridge.”

“THE LITTLE LEFT-HANDED MAN”
TAKES OVER

On his deathbed, Abu Bakr appointed his most trusted lieutenant, Umar
ibn al-Khattab, to succeed him as caliph. As far as Umar was concerned,
his first job upon becoming caliph was to put his enemy in his place.
Umar’s hatred for Khalid ibn al-Walid had not dimmed; even as Khalid
was defeating Byzantine armies that were larger and better equipped
in Syria, “the little left-handed man” finally had his chance: Umar sent
word that he was relieving Khalid of command.*

Khalid complied humbly, staying with the Muslim armies as a lesser
commander; however, the great general had the last laugh later, when Abu
Ubaydah, whom Umar had appointed commander of the Muslim armies,
heeded Khalid’s advice regarding the placement of the Muslim armies
against the Byzantines in the decisive battle of Yarmouk, and ultimately
placed him in command of the Muslim forces at Yarmouk. Khalid, always
behaving deferentially toward Abu Ubaydah, continued to win victory af-
ter victory over the infidels; he became a hero among the Muslims and was
hailed as “the sword of Allah.” There was one person, however, whom he
never entirely won over: Umar, now the caliph of the Muslims.

TAKING SYRIA

The Byzantines amassed a massive force to meet the Muslims at Yar-
mouk in Syria, once again far outnumbering the Muslim armies.” Be-
fore the battle, one of the Muslims, Miqdad, stood before the Muslims

56 Tue History or Jinap: From MunammMan to ISIS

and recited the eighth chapter of the Qur’an, “The Spoils of War,” also
known as “The Chapter of Jihad,” in order to instill in them the fighting
spirit.*° It was said that Muhammad had begun after the Battle of Badr
to recite this chapter before battles, and as he remained the “excellent
example” (33:21) for the Muslims, the practice continued.

In this chapter, Allah reminds the Muslims to remember, “When
your Lord inspired to the angels, ‘I am with you, so strengthen those who
have believed. I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieved,
so strike upon the necks and strike from them every fingertip.” (8:12) It
exhorts the Muslims to “fight them until there is no fitnah (disturbance,
rebellion] and the religion, all of it, is for Allah.” (8:39) And it reminds
them that Muhammad is to receive a fifth of the goods and women they
capture from the enemy: “And know that anything you obtain of war
booty—then indeed, for Allah is one fifth of it and for the Messenger
and for near relatives and the orphans, the needy, and the traveler.” (8:41)

Another Muslim commander, Abu Sufyan, went among the troops
exclaiming: “God, God! You are the defenders of the Arabs and the sup-
porters of Islam. They are the defenders of the Romans and the support-
ers of polytheism. O God, this is a day from among your days. O God,
send down your help to your worshipers.”

Thus inspired, the Muslims rushed to engage the Byzantines in bat-
tle. In the latter camp, morale was not so high. The Byzantine emperor
Heraclius, meanwhile, was worried. He told his lieutenants: “Did I not
tell you, “Do not fight them’? You have no staying power with these peo-
ple. Their religion is a new religion that renews their persistence, so that
no one will stand up to them but he will be tested.”

Indeed. Khalid and his men won a decisive victory at Yarmouk,
drastically weakening the Christian empire and paving the way for more
Arab conquests.*? The Muslims then struck a further blow to the Chris-
tians by expelling the Christian community at Najran in Yemen from the
Arabian Peninsula, in accord with what were recorded as Muhammad's
deathbed words: “If I live—if Allah wills—I will expel the Jews and the
Christians from the Arabian Peninsula.”

The Muslims moved on to a swift conquest of Damascus; the na-
tive Christian population was forced to pay the izya (tax), and Khalid
assured them that they would be safe as long as the money kept flowing:

CHAPTER Two 57

“The Muslims and their Caliph will practice nothing but good to the
people of Damascus while they keep paying the jizyah.”*

Umar likewise emphasized that the Muslims must be sure to col-
lect the jizya from the subjugated peoples, as it was nothing less than
the Muslims’ source of livelihood: “I advise you to fulfill Allah’s dhimma
[financial obligation made with the dhimmi] as it is the dhimma of your
Prophet and the source of the livelihood of your dependents [that is, the
taxes from the dhimmi,]’*6

TAKING PERSIA

With Syria now almost entirely under the control of the invaders, the
Muslims could turn their attention back to Persia. But many were re-
luctant, according to Tabari; “The Persian front was among the most
disliked and difficult of the warfronts for them, because of the strength
of the Persians’ sovereignty, their military force, their might, and their
subjection of the nations.”*” Finally Umar himself made an appeal, bas-
ing it firmly upon Islam:

The Hijaz is not a home for you except for foraging, its
inhabitants do not survive in it except by that. Where are
the impulsive migrants for the sake of God’s promise? Trav-
el in the Jand that God has promised you in the Book to
make you heirs to, for He has said, “That he may make it
[Islam] triumph over all religion” [cf. Qur'an 9:33, 48:28,
61:9]. God is the one who grants victory to His religion,
strengthens His helper, and commits to His people of the
inheritances of the nations. Where are the righteous wor-

shippers of God?*

Many Muslims heeded the call, and as far as they could tell, Umar’s
words proved true. The Muslims met a vastly superior Persian force
at Buwaib on the Euphrates; Muslim sources recorded that the Per-
sian army was devastated, losing one hundred thousand men to the
Muslims’ one hundred.* Soon after that, the armies approached each
other again at another town on the Euphrates, Qadisiyya. Despite

58 THe Htstory or Jinap: From Munammap to ISIS

their earlier losses, the Persians still vastly outnumbered the Muslims
and were vastly better equipped.

As seven thousand Muslims encamped to face a Persian force of
thirty thousand, the Persians were derisive. Seeing the thinness of the
Arabs’ arrows, the Persians laughed, saying the invaders had come armed
with spindles. Some of the Persians called out to the invading warriors:
“You have no might or power or weapons. What has brought you here?
Turn back!”*° The Arabs responded: “We shall not turn back. We are not
the kind of people who turn back.”**

The Persians invited the Muslims to send an emissary to explain
why they had come. The Muslims sent a warrior named Al-Mughirah,
who explained to Rustam, the Persian commander, and his men about
Islam and added: “If you kill us, we shall enter Paradise; if we kill you,
you shall enter the Fire, or hand over the poll tax.”°* The Persians snorted
derisively and retreated to the battle lines.

But the Persian emperor, Yazdegerd II, was intrigued. He sum-
moned the Muslim envoys to his court and asked them what they want-
ed. When the rough jihadis entered, clad in rustic cloaks and sandals and
carrying whips, the perfumed, splendidly clad Persian courtiers were as
amazed as they were contemptuous.”

Yazdegerd, however, was in no mood for mockery. He asked the
Muslims point-blank: “Why did you come here? What induced you to
attack us and covet our country?”

A member of the Muslim delegation, Al-Nu’man ibn Mugarrin,
answered by telling him about the prophet, whom he did not name,
who “promised us the goodness of this world and of the next,” and who
brought all the tribes of Arabia under his sway, “willingly or unwillingly.”
The prophet, said Al-Nu’man, “ordered us to start with the nations ad-
jacent to us and invite them to justice.” He added:

We are therefore inviting you to embrace our religion. This
is a religion which approves of all that is good and rejects
all that is evil. If you refuse our invitation, you must pay the
poll tax. This is a bad thing, but not as bad as the alterna-
tive; if you refuse, it will be war.*

CHArTER Two 59

Yazdegerd was incensed. He responded: “But for the custom not to kill
envoys, I would have killed you. I have nothing for you.”*> He told them
that the Persians would “punish you severely as an example for others.”%

But it was not to be. At Qadisiyya, the Persians were again decisively
defeated. The Muslims’ control over Iraq was now virtually total, and
the warriors of jihad continued moving against what remained of the
Sassanid Empire, pursuing the shattered remnants of the Persian army
into Persia itself.

When the Muslims took the Persian imperial capital of Ctesiphon
in 636, they entered the emperor’s White Palace, had the throne replaced
with a pulpit, proclaimed that there was no god but Allah and Muham-
mad was his prophet, and said Friday prayers there. One of them quoted
(or, given the lack of contemporary historical evidence of the existence
by this time of the Muslim holy book, perhaps composed) verses of the
Qur’an about the opulence they had conquered: “How much they left
behind of gardens and springs and crops and noble sites, and comfort
wherein they were amused. Thus. And We caused another people to in-
herit it. And the heaven and earth did not weep for them; nor were they
reprieved.” (44:25-29).

When the Arabs took Basra in Iraq, Umar instructed his lieutenant
Utbah bin Ghazwan to offer the people choices essentially identical to
those Khalid had previously offered the Persians: “Summon the people
to God; those who respond to your call, accept it from them, but those
who refuse must pay the poll tax out of humiliation and lowliness. If
they refuse this, it is the sword without leniency. Fear God with regard
to what you have been entrusted.”*”

With Persia largely subdued, Umar declared proudly: “The Empire
of the Magians has become extinct this day and from now on they will
not possess a span of land to injure the Muslims in any way.”** However,
he warned the Muslims that their ability to hold the land, and to con-
quer more, depended entirely upon their adherence to the will of Allah
and to the religion that the deity had declared “perfected” (Qur'an 5:3):
“Muslims do keep in mind not to admit any change in your way of life;
otherwise, Allah the Almighty will take the sovereign power from you
and give it to others.”®? The ability to gain and retain political power was
directly tied to one’s obedience to Allah and Islam.

60 THe History or Jinap: From Muyammap ‘ro ISIS

TAKING JERUSALEM
The modern-day Muslim historian Akbar Shah Najeebabadi portrays

the Muslim conquerors of the seventh century as magnanimous, benef-
icent, and tolerant:

Whenever the Muslim army halted for a few days, the
populace of that territory rose to welcome the Muslims as
providers of peace and prosperity. When the defeated na-
tions watched with their naked eyes, the blessings of peace,
morality, divine affection, justice, mercy, courage and the
ambition of their victories, they put themselves in their ser-
vice. It is an undeniable fact of history that humanity saved
itself only through the marching steps of the Arab forces.

The inhabitants of Jerusalem in the year 636 would undoubtedly have
had a different view.

At that point, it looked as if Allah was pleased with the Muslims’
level of devotion and ready to grant them more victories; it was now the
turn of Jerusalem. According to Tabari, Umar wrote its inhabitants a
conciliatory letter:

In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate.
This is the assurance of safety [aman] which the servant of
God, Umar, the Commander of the Faithful, has granted
to the people of Jerusalem. He has given them an assurance
of safety for themselves, for their property, their churches,
their crosses, the sick and the healthy of the city, and for all
the rituals that belong to their religion. Their churches will
not be inhabited [by Muslims] and will not be destroyed.
Neither they, nor the land on which they stand, nor their
cross, nor their property will be damaged. They will not be
forcibly converted. No Jew will live with them in Jerusalem.
The people of Jerusalem must pay the poll tax [jizya] like
the people of the [other] cities, and they must expel the
Byzantines and the robbers.”

CHaPpTER Two 61

That's Tabari’s version, but sources dating from the actual time of the
conquest do not depict the conquerors as being quite so magnanimous.
Sophronius, the patriarch of Jerusalem who, according to legend, turned
the city over to a magnanimous and tolerant Umar after the Arab con-
quest in 637, lamented the advent of “the Saracens who, on account of
our sins, have now risen up against us unexpectedly and ravage all with
cruel and feral design, with impious and godless audacity.”*

In a sermon in December 636 or 637, Sophronius deplored “so
much destruction and plunder” and the “incessant outpourings of human
blood.” He said that churches had been “pulled down” and “the cross
mocked,” and that the “vengeful and God-hating Saracens...plunder
cities, devastate fields, burn down villages, set on fire the holy churches,
overturn the sacred monasteries, oppose the Byzantine armies arrayed
against them, and in fighting raise up the trophies [of war] and add
victory to victory.” Strikingly, he made no mention of the conquerors’
coming with a new prophet, religion, or holy book.

Islamic legend, widely taken as fact, has it that Sophronius escorted
Umar around Jerusalem. When they reached the Church of the Holy
Sepulchre, which Christians said housed Christ’s tomb and was the site
of his resurrection from the dead, Sophronius invited Umar to pray in-
side the great church. Umar magnanimously turned him down, explain-
ing that his followers would use his prayer as a pretext to turn the church
into a mosque, and that he wanted to leave it for the Christians instead.
In his actual writings, Sophronius never mentioned this incident; nor did
he even mention Umar at all.

According to Islamic tradition, however, Umar and Sophronius con-
cluded a pact in which the Christians were not allowed to build new
churches, carry arms, or ride on horses, and must pay the jizya, but were
generally allowed to practice their religion and live in relative peace.”
Although this “Pact of Umar” is not likely to be authentic, it reflected the
core tenets of the Islamic legal system of the dimma, or contract of pro-
tection, which to this day remains part of Islamic law. “Protection” was
meant in the sense more of Mafiosi than of benefactors, since the dh1m-
mi’ life would be spared only if he converted to Islam or paid the jizya.

“The little left-handed man” was not so magnanimous when it came

to Khalid ibn al-Walid. He accused him of wrongfully appropriating

62 Tue History or JinaAp: From MuonAmMapD TO ISIS

funds that belonged to Muslims, and Umar summoned him to Medina.
Khalid, maintaining his innocence, was incensed, and confronted the
caliph: “I have complained about you to the Muslims. So help me God,
Umar, you have treated me like dirt!”°

Umar was in no mood to argue with Khalid over his treatment and
stuck to the matter at hand, asking the great general, “Where did you
get the money?” Khalid insisted that it had come from the spoils of war,
lawfully distributed, and that Umar's share was ready for him to take it.
Umar assessed Khalid’s possessions and found this to be true. He de-
clared that Khalid was an honorable man but relieved him permanently
from his command anyway, explaining his reasoning (because of Khalid’s
great fame among the Muslims):

I have not relieved Khalid from his post because he has
caused me displeasure or because of deceit on his part. But
the people were captivated by illusions on account of him,
so I was afraid that they would confer too much trust upon
him and would consequently be tested. I wanted them to
realize that it is God who is the creator of all things and I
did not want them to be subject to an illusion.”

Khalid ibn al-Walid retired to Emesa in Syria. Despite Umar’s cosmet-
ic explanation, it was clear to everyone that he had been dismissed in
disgrace. His contempt for Umar burned brighter than ever; he told his
wife: “Umar appointed me over Syria until it turned to wheat and honey;
then he dismissed me!” He wondered why Allah had not allowed him
the glory of a death on the battlefield as a martyr. Khalid, one of the
most successful generals in history, died in his bed a few years later, an
embittered and broken man.

TAKING EGYPT

The jihad continued. When the Muslim armies entered Egypt in 639,
they behaved much the same way as they had elsewhere. The leader of
the invasion, Amr ibn al-As, was extremely brutal. John of Nikiou, a sev-
enth-century Coptic Christian bishop, recounted in the 690s about what
happened when Umar's army arrived in Egypt some fifty years before:

CHartER Two 63

Amr oppressed Egypt. He sent its inhabitants to fight the
inhabitants of the Pentapolis [Tripolitania] and, after gain-
ing a victory, he did not allow them to stay there. He took
considerable booty from this country and a large number of
prisoners.... The Muslims returned to their country with
booty and captives. The patriarch Cyrus felt deep grief at
the calamities in Egypt, because Amr, who was of barbarian
origin, showed no mercy in his treatment of the Egyptians
and did not fulfill the covenants which had been agreed
with him.”

When they arrived in John’s native town of Nikiou, they were no
more merciful:

Then the Muslims arrived in Nikiou. There was not one
single soldier to resist them. They seized the town and
slaughtered everyone they met in the street and in the
churches—men, women and children, sparing nobody.
Then they went to other places, pillaged and killed all the
inhabitants they found.... But let us now say no more, for it
is impossible to describe the horrors the Muslims commit-
ted when they occupied the island of Nikiou...”

Amt’s men began to demand payment of the jzzya:

Amr’s position became stronger from day to day. He lev-
ied the tax that had been stipulated.... But it is impossible
to describe the lamentable position of the inhabitants of
this town, who came to the point of offering their children
in exchange for the enormous sums that they had to pay
each month, finding no one to help them because God had
abandoned them and had delivered the Christians into the
hands of their enemies.”

Similarly, an eyewitness to the conquest of a village near Alexandria
recounted:

64 Tur Hiscory oF Jinan: From MuvamMManp TO ISIS

We assembled all those captives who were still in our care,
and the Christians among them were grouped together.
Then we began to bring forward every single man from
among them and we gave him the choice between Islam
and Christianity. When he chose Islam, we all shouted,
“God is great,” even louder than we had done when that vil-
lage was conquered, and we gathered him within our ranks.
When he opted for Christianity, the Christians would snort
and pull him back into their midst, while we imposed the
jizyah on him.”

In light of all this, it is understandable that some of the captive people
did not see the conquerors as pious, but as hypocritical. The Panegyric
of the Three Holy Children of Babylon, a Christian homily dating from
soon after the Arab conquest of Egypt, said that the Arab conquerors
“sive themselves up to prostitution, massacre and lead into captivity the
sons of men, saying: ‘We both fast and pray.’””

Accordingly, the conquered people did not welcome their new over-
lords. Umar asked a Muslim who complained about the expenditures they
were making to conquer these vast new territories: “Do you think that
these vast countries, Syria, Mesopotamia, Kufa, Basra, Misr [Egypt] do
not have to be covered with troops who must be well paid?”” Apparently
the troops were needed in order to keep the captive populations in line.

Persia and Egypt were not by any means the only theater of jihad at
this point; the Muslims were proceeding northward as well. When the
Arabs conquered Armenia in 642, they behaved no less brutally than
they had elsewhere, killing untold numbers of people and taking captive
many more: “The enemy’s army rushed in and butchered the inhabitants
of the town by the sword.... After a few days’ rest, the Ismaelites [Arabs]
went back whence they had come, dragging after them a host of captives,
numbering thirty-five thousand.”

The Arabs were now a global force, controlling much of Syria and
the Levant, as well as most of Persia and Egypt. In the process of amass-
irig this vast empire, they had smashed one great power, the Sassanian
Empire, and greatly weakened the other, the Byzantine Empire. And
much, much more victory in jihad was to come.

Crarter Two 65

Yet Umar did not have long to savor his victories: his harsh treat-
ment of the peoples he had conquered ended up killing him. In 644,
Fayruz al- Nihawandi (aka Abu Luluah), a Christian slave who had been
captured by the Muslims during the conquest of Persia, stabbed Umar
many times while he was leading prayers in the mosque in Medina. He
died three days later.””

UTHMAN: THE THIRD
“RIGHTLY-GUIDED CALIPH”

Another early follower of Muhammad, Uthman ibn Affan, was chosen
as the next caliph. Ali was once again passed over, as he had been when
Abu Bakr was chosen. They did not formally leave the fold of Uthman’s
followers, but Ali’s partisans, the party of Ali (shia¢ At, whence the word
“Shia”), never accepted Uthman as the legitimate caliph.

Ali’s supporters mocked Uthman for cowardice, saying that he had
run away during some of the early battles of the Muslims, “like a donkey
runs from the lion.”’** Uthman didn’t deny this; he just said he had per-
mission: a 4adith depicts a Muslim asking the caliph Umar’s son Abdul-
lah, who was an old man by this time, if he was aware that Uthman fled
from the Battle of Uhud, was absent also from the Battle of Badr, and
didn’t even attend when Muhammad’s closest companions pledged their
fealty to him. Abdullah explains that Allah had “excused” Uthman from
Uhud, that Uthman’s wife was ailing and Muhammad asked him to stay
behind from Badr to care for her, as she was also Muhammad's daughter,
and that Uthman had also been on assignment from Muhammad when
his companions gathered to pledge their loyalty.”

However implausible these explanations may have sounded to many
of the early Muslims, Uthman had no trouble marshaling forces to con-
tinue the jihad. The Muslims completed the conquest of Egypt and kept
moving in North Africa, taking the former Roman territories of North
Africa and imposing the payment of the jizya upon those who refused to
convert to Islam. The jihadis also completed the conquest of Armenia.

Uthman’s caliphate saw the beginning of jihad on the high seas, as
well as the jihadis’ first incursion into Europe, albeit its outlying islands.

66 Tut History of Jinap: From MunamMand To ISIS

An enterprising young commander named Muawiya prevailed upon
Uthman in 649 to allow a jihadi naval expedition to Cyprus. The Mus-
lims defeated the Byzantines on the island easily, imposed the jizya, and
carried off much booty; then they proceeded to Rhodes, the site of one of
the ancient wonders of the world, the 108-foot-tall Colossus of Rhodes,
a statue of the sun god Helios that had been constructed in 280 BC to
stand bestride the harbor entrance, so that ships entering the harbor
would pass between its enormous legs. This magnificent effect lasted
only 54 years, however, as the Colossus toppled over in an earthquake
in 226 BC.

Even though toppled, the statue was still valued by the inhabitants
of Rhodes, even after they converted to Christianity, and because of its
immense size, it became a tourist attraction. But the Muslims had no
patience for such trifles: as far as Islam is concerned, all the artifacts of
pre-Islamic civilization are the products of jahiliyya, the society of unbe-
lievers, retaining no value whatsoever. The Qur’an even sees the ruins of
pre-Islamic civilizations as a sign of the judgment of Allah upon the un-
believers: “Many were the ways of life that have passed away before you:
travel through the earth, and see what was the end of those who rejected
truth” (3:137). Muawiya unsentimentally had the pieces of the Colossus
carted off the island and sold as scrap metal to a Jewish merchant, who
loaded the metal onto nine hundred camels and took it to Emesa.®

Appointed governor of Syria by Uthman, Muawiya wrote to the
Byzantine emperor Constantine “the Bearded” in 651, calling on him
to renounce Christianity and take up Abrahamic monotheism, or else:

If you wish to live in peace...renounce your vain religion, in
which you have been brought up since infancy. Renounce
this Jesus and convert to the great God whom I serve, the
God of our father Abraham.... If not, how will this Jesus
whom you call Christ, who was not even able to save him-
self from the Jews, be able to save you from my hands?*!

Meanwhile, the Egyptian city of Alexandria, having earlier agreed to
submit to Muslim rule and pay the jizya, revolted and had to be sub-
dued with extreme violence. Other revolts broke out as well, in the newly
subdued African province and in Persia. Nonetheless, the Arab empire

CiAPTER Two 67

was growing with astonishing rapidity; according to Islamic tradition,
Uthman moved to ensure that Islam would grow with it by compiling
the Qur’an as it stands today. It is said that he began this initiative in
the early 650s after a Muslim named Hudhaifa bin al-Yaman warned
Uthman that the Muslims were in danger of becoming like the Jews and
Christians: “O chief of the Believers! Save this nation before they differ
about the Book [Qur’an] as Jews and the Christians did before.””

Uthman appointed a commission to standardize and codify the
Qur’anic text, and once this work was done in 653, Uthman is sup-
posed to have distributed the final version to all the Islamic provinces
and burned all the variants.® Yet contrary to this account, which most
historians to this day take for granted as true, the Qur’an isn’t mentioned
anywhere for several more decades. If it was indeed standardized, cop-
ied, and distributed in the year 653, it is extremely strange that no one
seems to have taken notice of the fact, and that neither the Arabs nor the
people they conquered mentioned that the conquerors came with a new
religion, prophet, and holy book.

Uthman was assassinated in 656 by some Muslims who had rebelled
against his rule. His detractors accused him of the sin of did’@ (inno-
vation) for changing some of the practices to which the Muslims had
become accustomed. This was a serious offense for those who believed in
a religion that proclaimed its own perfection (“This day I have perfected
your religion for you,” Allah says in the Qur’an, 5:3.) When he saw the
forces arrayed against him, Uthman wrote in desperation to Muawiya,
one of his top generals, equating obedience to himself with adherence to
Islam: “The Medinese have become unbelievers; they have abandoned
obedience and renounced their oath of allegiance. Therefore send to me
the Syrian soldiers who are at your disposal, on every camel you have,
whether docile or stubborn.””

Muawiya, however, knowing that some of the Companions of Mu-
hammad (that is, Muhammad’s earliest and closest disciples) did not
support Uthman, delayed action on the caliph’s order. Muawiya had his
eye on the prize himself, but it would be a few years before he attained it.
In the meantime, after Uthman’s death, Ali ibn Abi Talib, the fourth and
last of the “Rightly-Guided Caliphs,” finally got his chance.

68 Tur History or Jrnhap: From MuuamMMaAp ro ISIS

ALI’S TROUBLED CALIPHATE

After so many spectacular conquests, now the jihad turned inward, as
the Muslims became more preoccupied with fighting among themselves
than with fighting infidels. Ali immediately faced challenges to his rule
so severe that his caliphate came to be known as the period of the First
Fitna (disturbance)—a time of chaos and civil war. Muhammad’s young-
est and favorite wife, Aisha, hated Ali with burning intensity because of
an incident late in Muhammad’s life, when Aisha was accused of adul-
tery, and instead of defending her, Ali advised Muhammad to forget
about her and let her be stoned to death. After all, the prophet of Islam
could always get other women.

Over two decades later, Aisha was not happy to hear that Ali was
now caliph. She had started out from her home in Mecca to make the
journey to Medina, but when she heard the news, she returned to Mec-
ca; when its governor, Abdallah ibn Amir al-Hadrami, asked her why
she had returned, she answered: “The fact that Uthman has been killed
unjustly and that as long as the mob rules, order will not be established.”
She cried out to Abdallah: “Seek revenge for the blood of Uthman, and
you will strengthen Islam!”*°

Aisha now embarked upon a jihad of her own, organizing an armed
revolt against Ali. She had no difficulty finding people who were willing
to join her, enraged at the murder of Uthman and unwilling to accept
Ali as caliph; despite Muawiya’s inaction when Uthman asked him for
help, they supported him for caliph instead of Ali. Those who thought
Uthman had been rightly killed as an innovator in Islamic practice sup-
ported Ali.

At the Battle of the Camel in Basra on November 7, 656, Aisha di-
rected her forces from the back of a camel, on which she was sitting fully
veiled and concealed inside a howdah. Ali, victorious perhaps because
he could move and see much more easily than she could, spared her life.

This magnanimous act, however, won him no supporters among
his enemies.** Aisha’s defeat did not unite the Muslims under Ali’s
leadership. Muawiya continued to press his claim to the caliphate; he
and Ali battled in 657 in Siffin, a village on the banks of the Euphrates
River in Syria.

CHAPTER ‘Two 69

Tabari, writing two centuries after the events he was recounting
supposedly occurred, recounted that when addressing Muawiya’s fore-
es, Ali framed the entire controversy as one of obedience or disobedi-
ence to Islam: “I have given you time so that you might revert to the
truth and turn to it in repentance. I have argued against you with the
Book of God and have called you to it, but you have not turned away
from oppression or responded to truth.”*” Speaking to his own men on
the eve of battle, he framed the conflict as an act of religious devotion:
“Tomorrow you will meet the enemy, so lengthen the night standing in
prayer, make abundant recitation of the Qur’an, and ask God for help
and steadfastness.”*

The battle was hotly contested and protracted; finally, when it
looked as if victory was in sight for Ali, one of Muawiya’s commanders,
the conqueror of Egypt, Amr ibn al-As, offered his chief a plan: in bat-
tle his forces would raise aloft their copies of the Qur’an and proclaim,
“Their contents are to be authoritative in our dispute.” When Muawiya’s
men did this, Ali claimed that Muawiya was ignorant of the true reli-
gion, calling his enemies “men without religion and without gur‘an.”*”
He charged that the raising up of copies of the Qur’an was a ruse: “They
do not exalt them and do not know what it is that they contain. They
have raised them up to you only to deceive you, to outwit you, and to
trick you.” He insisted: “The only reason | have fought against them was
so that they should adhere to the authority of this Book, for they have
disobeyed God in what He has commanded and forgotten His covenant
and rejected His Book.””°

Both sides finally agreed to arbitration based on the Qur’an. How-
ever, a third party in this dispute registered disapproval of the entire pro-
cess. The Khawarij, or Kharijites, were an especially fervent and violent
party of Muslims who had initially supported Ali but ultimately broke
with him. At this point, they complained to Ali that Muawtya and his
supporters had “always rejected our appeals when we summoned them
to the Book of God.”” Thus they considered Muawiya and his follow-
ers heretics who “should be killed or repent,” pressing Ali on what they
considered to be a violation of the Qur’an’s command, a contradiction of
his promises to abide by the word of Allah’s Book.” The Kharijites were

70 Tue History or Jinap: From MutrAmMManp vo ISIS

saying that Muawiya should not be negotiated with but simply fought—
as the Qur’an commanded. They were angry with Ali for submitting to
arbitration instead.

The arbitration was inconclusive anyway, Muawiya returned to Syria
and maintained an uneasy peace with Ali. But the Kharijites, enraged at
what they considered to be the deviation of both parties from obedience
to the Que’an, murdered Ali in 661 (they tried to kill Muawiya and Amr
as well but failed). At that point, Muawiya became caliph.

The story is full of legendary elements. This battle and the subse-
quent arbitration are supposed to have taken place only eight years after
Uthman codified the contents of the Qur’an and distributed the stan-
dardized copy to the provinces. It is extremely unlikely that Muawiya’s
men would have had so many copies of the Qur’an, in an age when every
book had to copied out by hand, that they could raise them on their
lances, and unlikely that they would have risked damage to the books
by doing so. However, Tabari's account shows that by the ninth century,
when the historian was writing his account, Islamic warfare was consid-
ered wholly in terms of obedience and disobedience to Islam.

MUAWIYA AND THE
UMAYYAD CALIPHATE

With the death of Ali ended the period of the “Rightly-Guided Ca-
liphate.” After Ali was killed, the people of Iraq hailed his son Hasan
ibn Ali as caliph; Muawiya made Hasan a gift of five million dirhams,
and his rival renounced his claim.?? Muawiya was not magnanimous in
victory; he told his lieutenant al-Mughira: “Do not tire of abusing and
insulting Ali and calling for God’s mercifulness for Uthman, defaming
the companions of Ali, removing them and omitting to listen to them;
praising, in contrast, the clan of Uthman, drawing them near to you and
listening to them.””

Someone in Muawiya’s camp composed a Aadith in which no less an
authority than Muhammad himself declared that Ali’s father and Mu-
hammad's guardian, Abu Talib, was burning in hell: “Perhaps my inter-
cession will be of use to him at the day of resurrection, so that he may
be transferred into a pool of fire which reaches only up to the ankles but

Ciaptrer Two 71

which is still hot enough to burn his brain.””> Muawiya’s opponents, not
to be outdone, invented their own Aadith in which Muhammad refers to
Hasan and his younger brother Husayn as his own children and says that
they were “Imams whether they stand up or sit down"—that is, whether
they actually ruled over the Muslims or not.™

Muawiya was the first caliph who was not a Companion of Muham-
mad; he had been but a youth when the Prophet of Islam was alive, and
once almost became the recipient of Allah’s curse. Muawiya’s father, Abu
Sufyan, was commander of the Quraysh during some of their wars with
Muhammad and the Muslims. Once, when a captive Muslim, Khubayb
ibn Adi, was being tortured, he cried out: “Allah, count them well. Kill
them all, one by one, and let not one escape!” Abu Sufyan and young
Muawiya were standing nearby; Abu Sufyan immediately threw Muaw-
ilya to the ground and held him there facedown, so that when Allah
passed by to curse all the enemies of the Muslims, he would not be able
to tell who the boy was and would, therefore, not know whom to curse.””

Muawiya thus survived long enough to become caliph. Befitting the
man who first took jihad to the seas, he ordered the construction of ships
and mounted the Muslims’ first siege of Constantinople around 670.
Having taken down the Persian Empire, the Muslims were determined
to destroy the Byzantine Empire as well. A Aadith depicts Muhammad
promising “the first army amongst my followers who will invade Caesar's
city [Constantinople] will be forgiven their sins.””? This statement was
almost certainly put into Muhammad’s mouth long after the first Mus-
lim siege of Constantinople, but there is no doubt that it reflected an
aspiration that those early jihadis shared, for to destroy Constantinople
in 670 would have meant that the Arabs had defeated both of the world’s
great powers within the span of three decades.

The invaders had not, however, reckoned with the mysterious weap-
on known as Greek Fire, which the Byzantines wielded against any Arab
ship that got too close to the great city. The Muslims tried sporadically
to breach the city’s defenses, but they proved too formidable; ultimately
the jihadis had to admit that they were defeated, an unusual occurrence
in the seventh century, and they retreated.

72 Tur Ylistory or JihaD: From MuriamMand to ISIS

KARBALA AND THE
SUNNI/SHVITE SCHISM

Muawiya found more success in dealing with internal enemies and unit-
ing most of the Muslims under his authority. He conducted campaigns
against the Kharijites and prevailed upon Hasan ibn Ali’s wife, Jada bint
al-Ashat, to kill her husband by poisoning in 670, establishing a prece-
dent that would be repeated many times in the coming years with rulers
of the shiat Ah.”

The jihad also continued elsewhere. The Muslims took Crete, ad-
vanced in North Africa, and won great victories in central Asia, press-
ing beyond Persia into Afghanistan. One of Muawiya’s most notable
achievements, meanwhile, was that he made the caliphate into a family
dynasty, which became known as the Umayyad Caliphate (after Umayya
ibn Abd Shams, patriarch of the Umayyad clan of Mecca). The immedi-
ate reaction to this development was not uniformly positive; it touched
off another period of civil war, the Second Fitna, as some of the Muslims
refused to accept the hereditary accession to the caliphate.’

Ultimately, the dispute came down to two hereditary successors: in
680, when Muawiya’s son, Yazid I, succeeded him, the second son of Ali,
Husayn, was not willing to accept Yazid’s authority. He gathered sup-
porters and stood at Karbala in Iraq against Yazid’s forces, which vastly
outnumbered the shiat Ah.

One of Muawiya’s men at Karbala, Abdullah ibn Umayr, expressed
impatience with all of this infighting. When he saw troops being as-
sembled and was told that they were going to fight Husayn, Abdullah
exclaimed: “By God! I was anxious to make holy war [jihad] against the
polytheists. | hope that making holy war against these people, who are
attacking the son of the daughter of the Prophet, will be no less rewarded
with God than His reward would be to me for making holy war against
the polytheists.”""' He fought for Husayn at Karbala.

Both sides at Karbala justified their fighting against other Muslims
by declaring them not Muslims at all. As the battle raged, several of
Muawiya’s warriors got close enough to Husayn to ask him if he ex-
pected to burn in hell when he died.'” One of the followers of Husayn
fought while repeating: “I believe in the religion of Ali.”' A follower

CuUAPTER Tyo q3

of Muawiya attacked him, crying: “I follow the religion of Uthman.”'™
The response: “Rather you follow the religion of Satan.” The follower of
Husayn then killed Muawiya’s man.!°

At Karbala, Husayn and his two sons, one who was just six months
old, were killed—but Husayn's followers refused to accept Yazid’s au-
thority, and the split in the Muslim community became permanent: the
shiat Al, that is, the Shia, and the majority Sunnis went their separate
ways, with both sides condemning and cursing the other as heretical,
and sporadically waging jihad against each other. The Shiites followed
not caliphs but Imams, all descended from Ali and believed to be im-
bued with prophetic infallibility and a portion of Muhammad's prophet-
ic spirit. The history of the Imamate, as might be expected, is one long
story of Sunni persecution.

CONQUERING NORTH AFRICA

While much of Yazid’s attention was taken up with subduing Husayn
and his followers, he did not neglect the larger jihad against infidels.
In 682, he sent the general Ugqba ibn Nafi with ten thousand jihadis
from Damascus into North Africa. Like his uncle Amr ibn al-As, Uqba
marched forward fearlessly, winning victory after victory. Entering the
former Roman province of Mauritania Tingitana, Uqba found its native
inhabitants to be desperately poor—too poor to provide much in the way
of spoils of war besides their girls, who were renowned for their beauty
and who ultimately fetched a thousand gold pieces each in the caliphate’s
sex-slave markets.

Pressing on as far as he could possibly go, Uqba ultimately reached
land’s end. Flush with victory, he rode his horse out onto the beach and
into the waves, where he stopped to exclaim that he wanted more: “Great
God! If my course were not stopped by this sea, I would still go on, to the
unknown kingdoms of the West, preaching the unity of thy holy name,
and putting to the sword the rebellious nations who worship any other
Gods than thee.”!”

But his course was stopped not just by the sea. The native North Af-
rican Berbers were unwilling to accept subjugation and Islamization and
rose up against the invaders. The Byzantines allied with the Christian Ber-

74 Tit History oF Jitian: From MunamManb To ISIS

ber king Kusaila in hope of preventing a Muslim conquest of the great
ancient city of Carthage. Uqba, heading westward, was ambushed in 682
at the town of Vescera (Biskra in modern-day Algeria). The Muslims were
defeated, Uqba was killed, and the Muslims were driven out of the Ber-
ber lands of modern-day Tunisia. The warriors of jihad suffered losses so
extensive that they were forced to withdraw also from Crete and Rhodes.

But the losses proved to be temporary. In 698, the Muslim general
Hasan ibn al-Nu’man defeated the Byzantines at Carthage and took the
city for Islam. Hasan could not, however, complete the Muslim conquest
of North Africa; he was defeated at Meskiana in Algeria by the Berber
queen Dahya, to whom the Muslims referred with a mixture of contempt
and fear as al-Kahina, the soothsayer. It was only by her black arts, they
said, that she was able to defeat the Muslims. Some said that she was
Jewish, a claim that many a jihadi would make about his foes throughout
the history of Islam." Since the Qur’an declared that the Jews would be
the worst enemies of the Muslims (5:82) and depicted them as scheming
indefatigably against Allah and his messenger, all their most determined
and resourceful foes 4ad to be Jewish.

Hasan was determined as well. In 700, he returned to North Africa,
defeated Dahya and her forces, and put an end to her independent Ber-
ber kingdom. The stage was set for the Muslims to spread Islam beyond
North Africa, as Uqba had exclaimed was his hope to do as his horse
tramped amidst the waves.

As all of this was going on, the infighting among the Muslims con-
tinued as well. After Yazid’s death in 683, rival claimants to the caliph-
ate waged jihad against one another. The Khawarij remained a nagging
problem. There were ongoing troubles from the Shiites as well.

SUBJUGATING THE CHRISTIANS

But amid it all, the jihad advanced, and the jihadis were determined to
keep what they seized; they worked assiduously to Islamize the lands
they now ruled. In the late 680s, the Muslim rulers of Egypt issued a
series of orders for the Christians in their domains: churches could no
longer bear crosses, and all crosses that could be publicly seen must be
destroyed. All churches had to post signs on their doors reading: “Mu-

CuariTer Two 75

hammad is the great apostle of God, and Jesus also is the apostle of God.
But truly God is not begotten and does not beget”—that is, Jesus was
not the only begotten Son of God. The Muslims were forcing the Chris-
tians to deny the faith on the very doors of their houses of worship.”
The caliph Muawiya II (683-684) began a persecution of Christians in
Iraq and destroyed many churches after the Catholicos of the Assyrian
Church refused his demand for gold. The persecution continued under
his successor, Abd al-Malik (685-705),

This persecution was transforming the conquered lands by making
conversion to Islam an easy option for relief from discrimination, harass-
ment, and constant threat. By the end of the seventh century, the Mus-
lims controlled and were rapidly Islamizing an immense area stretching
from North Africa to Central Asia, all of which they had won in a period
of six decades. It was an extraordinary achievement, and much more
jihad was to come.

PDF created by Rajesh Arya - Gujarat

YY W

CHAPTER THREE

THE JIHAD COMES TO
SPAIN AND INDIA

Jihad tn the Eighth and Ninth Centuries

I. THE JIHAD IN SPAIN BEGINS

Count Julian’s rage

Once North Africa was secured for Islam, the ancient Roman province of
Spain, now under Visigoth rule, was within reach. Here again, the avail-
able accounts contradict one another and are overlaid with legend, but a
general outline of events can be known, and even some of the legends are
illustrative of both the mindset of the day and some lingering tendencies.

The jihad in Europe, still raging today, began in 711, when Musa
al-Nusayr, the governor of the Muslim provinces of North Africa under
the caliph Walid, sent Muslim forces under the command ofa freed Ber-
ber slave named Tariq ibn Ziyad to cross the narrow strait that separated
Africa from Europe and take the land for Allah.

According to one Muslim chronicler, the Muslims came to Spain
at the invitation of an enraged Christian who was hungry for revenge.
Ibn Abd al-Hakam, writing in the ninth century, said that Tariq “with
his female slave of the name Umm Hakim” arrived in Tangiers some
time before Walid sent him to Spain, and “remained some time in this
district, waging a holy war.”! He eventually rnade the acquaintance of
a Christian, “Ilyan, Lord of Septa,” Count Julian of Ceuta, who had a
proposition for him.

78 Tuer History or JrnAn: From MunamMMap To ISIS

Count Julian was a ruler of some of the remaining Christian do-
mains in North Africa, subject to Roderic, the reigning (and last) Visig-
othic king of Spain. According to [bn Abd Al-Hakam, Julian was “the
governor of the straits between this district and Andalus” and “also the
governor of a town called Alchadra, situated on the same side of the
straits of Andalus as Tangiers.”

Tariq established contact with Count Julian. According to Ibn Abd
al-Hakam, Tariq “treated him kindly, until they made peace with each
other.” Eventually Tariq won Julian’s confidence to the extent that the
count told him of his personal sorrow. Julian, per Ibn Abd al-Hakam,
“had sent one of his daughters to Roderic, the Lord of Andalus, for
her improvement and education.” Like many a powerful man presented
with a comely intern, however, Roderic had taken advantage of the girl,
and “she became pregnant by him.” When he learned of the violation
of his beloved daughter, who became a vivid and controversial figure in
Spanish legend under the name Florinda La Cava, presented variously
as victim, seductress, and even prostitute, Julian was enraged. He was de-
termined to take revenge upon Roderic. It didn’t take him long to come
up with a plan: Roderic had destroyed his daughter, so he would destroy
Roderic’s kingdom. “I see for him no other punishment or recompense,
than that I should bring the Arabs against him.”!

Julian contacted his friend Tariq ibn Zayed and offered his help for
a jihadi invasion of Spain. Tariq was skeptical, telling Julian: “I cannot
trust you until you send me a hostage.” Julian had no problem with
that, and sent Tariq his two daughters; apparently, the prospect of their
becoming the sex slaves of a Muslim ruler didn’t trouble him as much as
Roderic’s behavior. In any case, the reception of the girls convinced Tariq
of Julian’s sincerity, and the plan went forward.

Julian also met with Musa ibn Nusayr and got his approval. Then
the traitor provided the Muslims with ships to carry the warriors of ji-
had across the strait that would not arouse the notice of any Spanish
sentries. These were preferable to the Muslims’ own ships for being fa-
miliar to the Spanish people. Ibn Abd al-Hakam explained: “the people
of Andalus did not observe them, thinking that the vessels crossing and
recrossing were similar to the trading vessels which for their benefit plied
backwards and forwards.”

Chuartre Turret 79

As he crossed the strait himself, Tariq spotted an island and left
his female slave, Umm Hakim, there with a division of troops. These
troops immediately sent a message to the people of that island, and to all
of Spain, that the invaders would not hesitate at any brutality. Finding
no one on the island except a group of vinedressers, they took them all
prisoner; then they chose one of them at random, whom they killed and
dismembered, Then they boiled the pieces of his body, while meat was
boiling in other cauldrons. Out of the sight of their prisoners, they threw
out the boiled pieces of their victim’s body, and then, as their prisoners
watched, began eating the meat they had been boiling. The vinedressers
were convinced that the Muslims were eating the flesh of the man they
had killed, and the Muslims freed them to spread this tale far and wide,
so as to “strike terror in the enemies of Allah,” (Qur’an 8:60)°

Tariq’s boats

Tariq and his men landed at the Mons Calpe, a rock formation at the
southern tip of the Iberian Peninsula; ultimately, the conqueririg Mus-
lims would rename it Jabal Tariq in his honor—the mountain of Tariq,
from which is derived the word “Gibraltar.” It has become part of Tariq’s
legend as an indomitable warrior that he ordered the Muslims to burn
the boats that Count Julian had supplied, that had just carried them to
Europe. The Muslims were going to take Spain from Islam or die there,
but there was no going back. Tariq posed this choice to his troops:

Oh my warriors, whither would you flee? Behind you is the
sea, before you, the enemy. You have left now only the hope
of your courage and your constancy. Remember that in this
country you are more unfortunate than the orphan seated at
the table of the avaricious master. Your enemy is before you,
protected by an innumerable army; he has men in abun-
dance, but you, as your only aid, have your own swords, and,
as your only chance for life, such chance as you can snatch
from the hands of your enemy.’

He reminded them of the rewards that awaited them if they won. The
Qur’an allowed a Muslim to have sexual intercourse not only with his

80 THe History or Jinap: From MuHAMMAD TO ISIS

wives but with the “captives of the right hand” (4:3, 4:24, 23:1-6) that
were the spoils of war (33:50), and there were plenty of young women in
Spain who could be used in this way:

You have heard that in this country there are a large num-
ber of ravishingly beautiful Greek maidens, their graceful
forms are draped in sumptuous gowns on which gleam
pearls, coral, and purest gold, and they live in the palaces
of royal kings.®

The caliph, meanwhile, was forsaking his rightful share of the booty;
the only thing he wanted was for Islam to be established in Spain:

The Commander of True Believers, Alwalid, son of Ab-
dalmelik, has chosen you for this attack from among all his
Arab warriors; and he promises that you shall become his
comrades and shall hold the rank of kings in this coun-
try. Such is his confidence in your intrepidity. The one fruit
which he desires to obtain from your bravery is that the
word of God shall be exalted in this country, and that the
true religion shall be established here. The spoils will be-
long to yourselves.?

Tariq ended his address by calling upon his men to kill Roderic. There
were others on the Christian side besides Count Julian who wanted him
dead as well. Roderic was a usurper, and some of the chronicles of the
Muslim invasion of Spain have the sons of a previous Visigothic king,
Witiza, aiding the Muslim armies against Roderic. Also helping the Mus-
lims was Witiza’s brother Oppas, the archbishop of Toledo and Seville.
Whatever the historical value of these accounts, there has never been a
shortage of non-Muslims willing to aid the jihad for their own purposes.
The two armies met near the Guadalete River in the lower Gua-
dalquivir valley. As seemed always the case in the days of the early jihad
conquests, the Muslims were vastly outnumbered. Roderic appeared on
the field of battle dressed as if he were certain of victory: he was arrayed
in a gorgeous gold robe, with a crown of pearls on his head, and was
carried on a litter of ivory. But the battle did not go well for the defend-
ers. According to Ibn Abd al-Hakam: “And there was never in the West

CHAPTER THREE 81

a more bloody battle than this. The Moslems did not withdraw their
swords from Roderic and his companions for three days.””

As the Visigoths’ losses mounted, Roderic fled the field of battle; his
magnificent crown and robe were found on the riverbank, but there was
no trace of the king. The Muslims concluded that Roderic had drowned
in the river; they beheaded someone else, sending the head back as Rod-
eric’s to the caliph Walid, who was headquartered in Damascus, as a
symbol of his triumph.”

Conquering Spain

Count Julian’s thirst for revenge was not slaked by Roderic’s death. He
went to Tariq and urged him to press on and conquer all of Spain: “The
king of the Goths is slain; their princes are fled before you, the army is
routed, the nation is astonished. Secure with sufficient detachments the
cities of Boetica; but in person and without delay, march to the royal city
of Toledo, and allow not the distracted Christians either time or tran-
quillity for the election of a new monarch.” Toledo was at that time the
capital of Spain. Tariq heeded his advice and marched north, meeting
very little resistance and capturing Toledo with relative ease. Among the
spoils he seized was a table of emeralds that was said to have belonged
to King Solomon, taken from the Temple in Jerusalem by the Romans as
they were destroying it in AD 70.

Back across the strait, Musa heard of Tariq’s astonishing victories
and grew envious. Not to be upstaged, he landed in Spain with an army
of eighteen thousand Muslims and began seizing towns and cities that
Tariq had bypassed, most notably Seville. Some Christian turncoats
who had entered Seville posing as refugees opened the gates of the city
for Musa and his men, and the plunder began. Leaderless, dispirited,
riven with short-sighted factionalism and beset with widespread trea-
son, Visigothic Spain collapsed with amazing speed before the invading
Muslims. By 718, just seven years after Tariq and his men burned their
boats and determined to take the land for Islam or die, they had done so:
Spain was almost entirely subdued.

82 Tne History or Jinan; From Munammap To ISIS

The Holdout

Almost entirely. In Asturias in northwestern Spain, those among the
Visigoths who were not utterly defeated or traitorous in 718 chose as
their leader a man named Pelayo, who immediately told the local Mus-
lim overlords that he would not pay the jizya. He established what he
called the Kingdom of Asturias and began to attack the Muslim bases
in the area. The warriors of jihad made only perfunctory attempts to
find and kill Pelayo and destroy his little kingdom, for they didn’t re-
gard it as significant enough: they were pressing on into France, and a
few Christian fanatics in a remote, mountainous region of Spain didn’t
worry them.

However, after the harassment from Pelayo’s men caused a Mus-
lim governor, Munuza, to flee the area, the Muslims had had enough.
Munuza returned with a Muslim commander, al-Qama, and an army,
to put an end to Pelayo’s Kingdom of Asturias once and for all. Al-
Qama and Musa brought with them the renegade bishop Oppas.
According to an early tenth-century account, Oppas sought out Pelayo
in his mountain hideaway and told him resistance was futile: “I believe
that you understand how the entire army of the Goths cannot resist the
force of the Muslims; how then can you resist on this mountain? Listen
to my advice: abandon your efforts and you will enjoy many benefits
alongside the Moors.”

Pelayo was unmoved by this appeal to defeatism. He made a counter-
appeal to Oppas’ putative religion: “Have you not read in Sacred Scripture
that the Church of the Lord is like the mustard seed, which, small as it
is, grows more than any other through the mercy of God? Our hope is in
Christ; this little mountain will be the salvation of Spain and of the people
of the Goths; the mercy of Christ will free us from that multitude.”

At first it appeared as if the Muslims would have no trouble over-
coming this little rebellion, as they regained control of much of the area
with little or no resistance. But Pelayo and his force of only three hun-
dred men were hiding deep in the mountains; they swept into the val-
ley at the village of Covadonga and surprised the Muslim forces, which
vastly outnumbered them. In a turnabout of the usual scenario in early
jihad attacks, the Christians were both outnumbered and victorious. Af-

CHAPTER THREE 83

ter another defeat at his hands, the Muslims decided to leave Pelayo and
his tiny kingdom alone.

Pelayo’s words to Oppas proved prophetic. That Kingdom of
Asturias and Battle of Covadonga were the beginning of the seven-
hundred-year effort by the Christians of Spain to drive the Muslims
out: the Reconquista.

Treatment of the Conquered People

As the conquest of Spain was being completed, the Umayyad caliph
Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz sent out a message to the governors of the various
Islamic provinces, denouncing non-Muslims:

O ye who believe! The non-Moslems are nothing but
dirt. Allah has created them to be partisans of Satan; most
treacherous in regard to all they do; whose whole endeavor
in this nether life is useless, though they themselves imag-
ine that they are doing fine work. Upon them rests the curse
of Allah, of the Angels and of man collectively."

According to the thirteenth-century Muslim jurist Ghazi ibn al-Wasiti,
Umar also “commanded that both Jews and Christians should be for-
bidden to ride upon saddles; that no one belonging to the ‘Protected
People’ should be allowed to enter a public bath on Friday, except after
Prayer-time. He ordered, further, that a guard should be set to watch
both Jews and Christians whenever they slaughtered an animal, so that
the guard should mention the name of Allah and of his Prophet [at such
a slaughter].”"”

The Umayyad caliphate began large-scale dealing in slaves, requir-
ing not only physical laborers but sex slaves for the harems of the caliphs
and other high officials, as well as eunuchs who could be trusted to guard
these harems. The warriors of Islam drew these slaves beginning in the
eighth century from regular raids in three principal areas: Central Asia,
the northern fringes of Sub-Saharan Africa, and Central and southeast-
ern Europe, which they called Bilad as-Saqaliba, slave country. The eth-
nic designation “Slav” 1s derived from the Arabic “sag/ab,” or slave.'8

84 Tue History or Jin#AD!: From MuyamMap tro ISIS

Il. THE JIHAD IN INDIA BEGINS

Conquering Sindh

In 711, the same year that Tariq ibn Ziyad and his men crossed the
Strait of Gibraltar in Count Julian’s boats and began the jihad against
Spain, the Umayyad Empire was expanding eastward as well. Hajjaj ibn
Yusuf, the governor of Iraq, sent the general Muhammad ibn Qasim into
Sindh, modern-day western Pakistan. It was the beginning of the jihad
conquest of India.

Hajjaj gave his commander ruthlessly precise instructions:

My ruling is given: Kall anyone belonging to the combatants
[ah/-i hard); arrest their sons and daughters for hostages
and imprison them. Whoever submits...grant them aman
[protection] and settle their tribute [amwa/] as dhimmah.”

This policy severely discouraged resistance. The Muslim invaders of In-
dia treated the native population with extraordinary harshness. In ji-
had campaigns in Europe, as well as in the Middle East and Persia, the
warriors of jihad had subjugated the local populations and collected the
jizya from them—the Qur’an-mandated (9:29) poll tax to be paid by
the People of the Book, that is, the monotheistic Jews, Christians, and
Zoroastrians, But the Hindus, Jains, and Buddhists whom Muhammad
ibn Qasim and his jihadis encountered in Hindustan were not People of
the Book, and hence no jizya could be demanded from them. Their only
choices were to convert to Islam or face the sword of Islam.

The Indians quickly realized just how ruthless their foe really was.
As the Muslims besieged the city of Brahmanabad, its inhabitants saw
the writing on the wall:

If we unite and go forth to fight, we will be killed: for even
if peace is [subsequently] made, those who are combatants
{ahl-i silat] will all be put to death. As for the rest of the
people; aman is given to the merchants, artisans, and ag-
riculturalists. It is better that we be trusted. Therefore, we

CHAPTER THREE 85

should surrender the fort to him on the basis of a secure
covenant [ahd-i wathiq].”°

However, not all of the Sindhis were that willing to give up without a
struggle, even at Brahmanabad. The Muslim response was just as fierce;
Muslims massacred between six thousand and twenty-six thousand
Sindhis at Brahmanabad, six thousand more at Rawar, four thousand at
Iskalandah, and six thousand at Multan.

As Muhammad ibn Qasim’s jihad in India continued, however, it
proved to be impractical to offer ail the people in India the choice of
conversion to Islam or death: there were simply too many people in India
for them all to be converted to Islam or killed. Consequently, an adjust-
ment had to be made, and Muhammad ibn Qasim ultimately granted
the Hindus the status of the People of the Book, accepting their submis-
sion and payment of the jizya, with the ultimate objective remaining to
bring all of these people into the fold of Islam.”!

The jihadis, however, were unremittingly ruthless toward Hindu
temples. The Qur'an says: “And were it not that Allah checks the people,
some by means of others, there would have been demolished monaster-
ies, churches, synagogues, and mosques in which the name of Allah is
much mentioned.” (22:40) The Qur’an regards Jesus and the prophets of
Hebrew Scriptures as prophets and the Torah and Gospel as legitimate
revelations, although it contends that the Jews and Christians twisted
their prophets’ words and altered the scriptures they received. Conse-
quently, while many churches and synagogues were seized throughout
the history of jihad and turned into mosques, this was never a thor-
oughgoing or universal policy. Hindu temples, by contrast, were always
considered to be centers of idolatry, in which the “name of Allah” was not
“much mentioned,” and consequently they were to be destroyed when-
ever possible.

At Daybul, the Muslims faced a force of four thousand Rajputs (In-
dian warriors) and two to three thousand Brahmins (Hindu priests) de-
fending a Hindu temple. Once victorious, Muhammad ibn Qasim had the
temple destroyed and the Brahmins circumcised so as to convert them to
Islam. However, seeing that his new converts were resisting, rather than
embracing, their new religion, he ordered all of them over the age of sev-
enteen to be executed.”” The victorious jihadis began a massacre so inten-

86 Tur Hisrory oF Jinap: From MunamMMan TO ISIS

sive that it lasted three days. Young women and children were enslaved,
but in a rare act of mercy, older women were freed outright."

Seeing the immensity of the task before him, Muhammad ibn Qa-
sim began encouraging the locals to surrender rather than fight; but this
aroused the ire of his boss. Hajjaj wrote to Muhammad urging him to be
more discriminating between those who had surrendered sincerely and
those who had not, and charged that his practice of granting protection
was un-Islamic:

] am appalled by your bad judgment and astounded by your
policies. Why are you so intent on giving aman, even to an
enemy whom you have tested and found hostile and intran-
sigent? It is not necessary to give aman to everyone without
discrimination.... In any case, if [the Sindis] sincerely re-
quest aman and desist from treachery, they will surely stop
fighting. Then income will meet expenditures and this long
situation will be concluded.... It is acknowledged that all
your procedures have been in accordance with religious
law [ar jadah-yi shar] except for the one practice of giving
aman. For you are giving aman to everyone without distin-
guishing between friend and foe.”

His instructions to Muhammad ibn Qasim were ruthlessly precise:

God says, “Give no quarter to infidels but cut their throats.”
Then you shall know that this is the command of the great
God. You shall not be too ready to grant protection, because
it will prolong your work. After this give no quarter to any
enemy except those of rank.”

Muhammad ibn Qasim may have been too lenient for Hajjaj’s taste,
but as he subdued Sindh he was ruthless against manifestations of non-
Muslim religion. At Nirun, he had a mosque built on the site of a Bud-
dhist temple, and appointed an imam to instruct converts in the new,
dominant religion. After a series of victories over Dahir, king of Sindh,
Muhammad wrote triumphantly to Hajjaj:

CHAPTER THREE 87

The forts of Siwistan and Sisam have been already taken.
The nephew of Dahir, his warriors, and principal officers
have been dispatched, and infidels converted to Islam or
destroyed. Instead of idol temples, mosques and other plac-
es of worship have been built, pulpits have been erected, the
Khutba [Islamic Friday sermon] is read, the call to prayers
is raised so that devotions are performed at the stated hours.
The takbir [“A//ehu akbar’) and praise to the Almighty God
are offered every morning and evening.”

At Multan, Muhammad ibn Qasim ordered the destruction of an im-
mense idol made of gold, with eyes of rubies. According to the Chach
Nama, a twelfth-century Persian history of the conquest of Sindh that
may have been based on an earlier Arabic original, “Two hundred and
thirty mans of gold were obtained, and forty jars filled with gold dust.
This gold and the image were brought to the treasury together with the
gems and pearls and treasures which were obtained from the aie
of Multan.””*

Muhammad ibn Qasim left another idol in place at Multan because
of its popularity, intending to profit from the many offerings left there;
however, to show his horror at Hindu superstition, and seeing that the
cow was sacred to Hindus, he ordered that the idol’s necklace be removed
and replaced with a piece of cow’s flesh.” The idol did not protest. The
great general and his followers told the Hindus that was a sign that their
idols were false and the harsh god of the invaders was the only true god.

The conquering jihad commander sent some of his massive haul
back to the caliph Walid, along with two choice sex slaves, the daughters
of the Sindhi king Dahir himself. One of them, named Janaki, particu-
larly caught the caliph’s eye, but when he took her to bed, the panicked
girl told him that she had already been raped by Muhammad ibn Qasim.

Walid was enraged. Muhammad ibn Qasim had dared to send him
damaged goods. Immediately he ordered that the victorious general, vic-
tories or no, be sewn up into a rawhide sack and shipped to his court.
By the time the sack containing Muhammad ibn Qasim arrived, he was
already dead.

The cause of Walid’s monumental fit of temper, Janaki, was appalled.
“The king has committed a very grievous mistake,” she exclaimed, “for

88 Tue History or JinAp: From MutHAMMAD TO ISIS

he ought not, on account of two slave girls, to have destroyed a person
who had taken captive a hundred thousand modest women like us and
who instead of temples had erected mosques, pulpits and minarets.”*°
In any case, the killing of Muhammad ibn Qasim stalled the jihad
in India. But the subcontinent was never forgotten. A century or so after
Muhammad ibn Qasim’s jihad in Sindh, words were put into the mouth
of Muhammad, the Prophet of Islam, emphasizing the importance of ji-
had in India. Abu Huraira, one of Muhammad’s companions, is depicted
in a Aadith as saying: “The Messenger of Allah promised that we would
invade India.”*! In another Aadit#, Muhammad himself says: “There are
two groups of my Ummah whom Allah will free from the Fire: The
group that invades India, and the group that will be with Isa bin Maryam

[Jesus Christ], peace be upon him.”

II. THE JIHAD IN
CONSTANTINOPLE BEGINS

The Second Siege of Constantinople

With Islam on the march in the East, as the warriors of jihad conquered
Sindh, and in the West, with the Islamic conquest of Spain nearly com-
pleted and the jihadis pressing on into France, the Muslims were at a
pinnacle of confidence: it looked as if Allah had indeed granted them
hegemony over the entire world; all they had to do was seize it. And so,
in 717, they made their second attempt to capture the jewel of Christen-
dom and the capital of the great empire that still stood as the foremost
obstacle to their plans: Constantinople.

The caliph Suleyman appointed his brother, Maslama, as com-
mander of the Muslim forces for the siege. Maslama set out for Con-
stantinople with a force of over one hundred thousand men and a huge
fleet. As the siege began, the Byzantine general Leo the Isaurian, soon
to be Emperor Leo III, asked for negotiations; Maslama sent a Muslim
commander named Ibn Hubayrah.

The negotiations proceeded as a game of verbal chess. Ibn Hu-
bayrah tried to maneuver Leo into admitting that resistance to the Mus-

CHAPTER THREE 89

lim armies was foolish, asking him: “What do you consider to be the
height of stupidity?”

Instead of admitting that the Byzantines’ situation was hopeless,
however, Leo responded: “The man who fills his stomach with every-
thing that he finds”—a slap at the Muslims’ apparently insatiable desire
for conquest.*4

Ibn Hubayrah replied that he was only following orders: “We are
men of religion, and our religion calls for obedience to our leaders.”®

Leo then offered to pay the Muslims to leave: one dinar for the
head of everyone in the great city. Maslama, however, rejected this of-
fer, whereupon Leo came back to him with a new one. He told Masla-
ma: “The people [of Constantinople] know that you will not advance
against them in a bold attack and that you intend to prolong the siege
as long as you have food. But if you were to burn the food, they would
submit,” as they would be afraid that the Muslims were burning their
food because they were not planning to stay long but were preparing
an imminent attack.*°

Maslama believed him and burned the Muslims’ food supplies. But
the Byzantines did not surrender. According to the historian Tabari,
during the difficult winter of 718, the jihadis camped around Constan-
tinople “ate animals, skins, tree roots, leaves—indeed, everything except
dirt.”*’ The winter was so severe that Suleyman could not send the Mus-
lims supplies or reinforcements.

The caliph Suleyman died with the Muslims still besieging Constan-
tinople; his successor, Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz, recognized that the Muslim
armies were ill-supplied and ill-equipped to deal with the Greek Fire that
the Byzantines were using to destroy much of the Muslim fleet. On August
15, 718, the Muslims ended the siege, which the grateful citizens of Con-
stantinople attributed to the aid of the Virgin Mary, whose falling asleep
and departure from this world, or Dormition, was celebrated on that day.

IV. DEFEATS AND INTERAL STRIFE

The jihadis’ failure at Constantinople was costly. The Muslims limped
back to Umayyad domains with their fleet mostly destroyed. The Byz-
antines took immediate advantage of this, driving the Muslims out of

90 THe History oF JINAD: FROM MuHAMMAD TO ISIS

Sicily and conducting raids in Syria and Egypt.

Meanwhile, the warriors of jihad were losing elsewhere as well: in
720, the Turkic Turgesh warrior Kursul defeated them in battle near
Samarkand. Four years later, the jihadis, harassed by a superior Turkic
force, beat a hasty retreat to the river Jaxartes in Transoxiana (modern
Tajikistan), only to find their path back to Umayyad domains blocked
by hostile forces. Knowing this would be a fight to the death, the Mus-
lims burned their supplies, valued at one million dirhams, and fought
successfully to break through despite increasing hunger and thirst in
what would come to be known as the Day of Thirst—a humiliation that
would burn in the memories of many Muslims until long after the Mus-
lim losses were regained and their prestige restored.

The Muslim presence in Central Asia was now substantially dimin-
ished, albeit only temporarily.** The Umayyads continued to send forces
into Khurasan and Transoxiana (modern-day northeast Iran, Uzbeki-
stan, Tajikistan, and the surrounding areas), but they were hampered in
their ability to secure the region by some of their own policies.

The Umayyads have gone down in Islamic history as notably irre-
ligious, a curious charge for a dynasty that was established within thirty
years of the generally accepted date of Muhammad's death, raising the
inevitable questions of why the fervor for Islam was lost so quickly after
its founding, and how the Umayyads retained power over the Muslims
for nearly a century while continually flouting or ignoring core precepts
of the religion. The most plausible explanation for this is that the Uma-
yyads were not actually irreligious, but that Islam itself was at the time of
their reign in an inchoate state, with even the Qur'an and the elements of
the life of Muhammad that would become the sources and foundation of
Islamic doctrine not set in their final form until the Umayyads had ruled
for four or five decades. Later, however, when it became accepted even
among non-Muslim historians that Uthman had codified and distrib-
uted the Qur’an in 653, and statements attributed to Muhammad that
appear only in the eighth or ninth centuries were taken for granted as
having actually been spoken by him in the seventh, the only explanation
for the Umayyads’ apparent indifference to all of this material was that
they were impious and sinful.

CHAPTER THREE 91

One example of this Umayyad impiety was that they imposed the
jizya and the kharaj, a land tax, upon non-Arab converts to Islam in
Central Asia. Muslim rulers who tried to reverse this policy faced com-
plaints from Arab settlers in Khurasan, as well as an inevitable decline
in tax revenues that threatened to make their position fiscally untenable.
In the late 720s, the Umayyad governor of Khurasan, Ashras ibn Abdal-
lah al-Sulami, promised the Soghdians, a Central Asian people among
whom were Zoroastrians, Buddhists, and Nestorian Christians, equal
tax rates with the Arabs if they converted to Islam. The mosques were
flooded with converts, but local non-Arab rulers began to complain to
Ashras that they could not meet their own tax quotas, since so many of
their people were “becoming Arabs.””

Unnerved, Ashras began placing more stringent requirements
upon converts, most notably that they provide proof of circumcision.
Just ten years before, the caliph Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz had forbid-
den this, saying, “God sent Muhammad to call men to Islam, not as
a circumciser,” and commanding that non-Arab converts to Islam be
placed on an equal footing with the Arabs, but pressures from the Ar-
abs themselves, and the need to keep tax revenues up, often led to these
commands’ being ignored.”

However, Ashras’ reneging on his initial offer led to an uprising of
the non-Arab Muslims, aided by sympathetic Arabs, including a war-
rior named al-Harith ibn Surayj, who in 734 led a large-scale revolt
against Umayyad rule in Khurasan and Transoxiana, promising equality
of non-Arab Muslims with Arabs, and other reforms.

The Arab response was swift and brutal. Arriving at Balkh, the an-
cient Bactria in what is now northern Afghanistan, the Muslim com-
mander Juday al-Iirmani likened the people of the city to “the adulter-
ous woman who gives access to her leg to whomever comes to her” for
allying with al-Harith.*! He vowed that if he discovered anyone who
was sending messages to al-Harith, “I will cut off his hand and foot
and crucify him”—the punishment that the Qur’an (5:33) prescribes for
those who “wage war against Allah and his messenger.” The governor of
Khurasan, Asad ibn Abdallah al-Qasri, ordered al-Kirmani to send him
fifty of the leaders of Balkh, whom he immediately killed. Asad directed

92 Tie History oF Jinap: From MunamMapd To ISIS

al-Kirmani to divide the rest of the men of the city into three groups, and
to crucify one group, cut off the hands and feet of the second, and cut off
the hands only of the third. Al-Kirmani complied, killing and crucifying
four hundred men and auctioning off their property.”

Despite the brutality of the Umayyads, the revolt continued. In 736,
a Muslim named Ammar ibn Yazid, who called himself Khidash, arrived
in Marw in Khurasan and began calling believers to allegiance not to the
Umayyad caliph Hisham ibn Abdel Malik but to the Shi'ite leader, the
fifth Imam, Muhammad ibn Ali. Khidash, however, was quickly cap-
tured and brought to Asad, who ordered him blinded and his tongue cut
out. Asad told the rebel commander: “Praise be to God who has taken
revenge on you for Abu Bakr and Umar.” Asad then ordered Khidash
killed and the body crucified, and for good measure, had Muhammad
ibn Ali, who was living quietly in Medina, murdered by poisoning.®

Asad died in 738, and his successor, Nasr ibn Sayyar, stymied the
rebellion by defeating and killing both Kursul and al-Harith. He also
moved to take the wind out of the rebels’ sails by promising to end the
collection of the jizya from non-Arab Muslims, and the widespread ex-
emption of non-Muslims from paying the jzzya. At Marw, Nasr declared:

Verily, Bahramsis was the protector of the Magians [zma-
jus); he favored them, protected them and put their burdens
on the Muslims. Verily, Ashbdad son of Gregory was the
protector of the Christians, just as Agiva the Jew protected
the Jews. But I am protector of the Muslims. I will defend
them and shield them and make the polytheists carry their
burdens. Nothing less than the full amount of the kdaraj as
written and recorded will be accepted by me. I have placed
Mansur b. Umar b. Abi al-Kharga as my agent [ami/] over
you and I have ordered him to act justly toward you. If there
is aman amongst you who is a Muslim and from whom /i-
zyah has been levied, or who has been charged an excessive
amount of kAaraj, thus lightening the burden for the poly-
theists, then let him raise that with Mansur b. Umar so that
he may take the burden away from the Muslim and place it
upon the polytheist.

CHAPTER THREE 93

Mansur acted quickly. “By the following Friday,” per Tabari, “Mansur
had dealt with thirty thousand Muslims who had been paying the /i-
zyah and eighty thousand polytheists who had been exempted from the
Jjizyah. He imposed the jizyah on the polytheists and removed it from
the Muslims.”* The impetus of the revolt had been removed and a key
element of Islamic law codified, placing the burden for filling the Islamic
treasury squarely upon non-Muslims, and the rebellion was crushed.

The Loss of France

Nonetheless, Umayyad hegemony was weakening across the board. In
the West, the Muslims faced more and even greater difficulties. After
their defeat at Covadonga, the Muslims decided no longer to bother
with Pelayo's tiny band of holdouts in the mountains; a Muslim chroni-
cler said derisively, “What are thirty barbarians perched on a rock? They
must inevitably die.”** The warriors of jihad had already entered France,
where they conquered the ancient Roman province of Septimania in
southwestern France without much difficulty, moved into Aquitaine, and
pressed on. The people of southern France were poor and could offer lit-
tle in the way of booty to the invaders, so the Muslims began despoiling
churches and monasteries, as well as the popular shrine of St. Hillary of
Poitiers, taking what they believed to be their due from the treasure of
the infidels.

There was another shrine that was a favored site of pilgrims and
contained a good deal of silver and gold: that of St. Martin of Tours, in
north-central France. In 732, the Muslims under the command of Abdul
Rahman al-Ghafiqi, governor of al-Andalus, proceeded to march there.

Frankish authorities, seeing their advance, were not sure if the jihad-
is constituted simply a raiding party determined to carry away the loot
at St. Martin’s shrine or an actual invading force. Ultimately, however,
there was little difference. Inspired by the exhortations of the Qur’an and
Muhammad, the warriors of Islam ultimately intended to seize and hold
every bit of land on earth and were determined to continue their jihad
wherever and whenever possible. Whether they intended to hold Tours
in 732 or not, they intended to do so eventually, and advance farther, as
far as the land and sea would take them.

94 Tur History or Jinan: From MuxnAMMaAD To ISIS

In any case, it was the Muslims who made a far greater miscal-
culation, drastically underestimating the strength of the forces that
gathered between Tours and Poitiers to stop them. The commander of
those forces was a Frankish duke named Charles, who gained the name
Martel, “The Hammer,” for his decisive victory there. October 25, 732
was a bitterly cold day, and the Franks routed the jihadis, who had come
dressed for a Spanish summer. Al-Ghafiqi and the remnants of his army
beat a scorched-earth retreat back to al-Andalus, burning and looting
everything in sight.

But the Franks would rebuild. The Muslims’ defeat was near total,
and would be total before long. In 734, they lost Avignon in southern
France, and not long thereafter were driven out, of France altogether,
even as they were strengthening and consolidating their hold on Spain.

The Battle of Tours in 732 may have stopped the complete conquest
and Islamization of Europe. The warriors of jihad would appear again
in France, but they would not come close again to gaining control of the
whole country until many centuries later, by vastly different means, when
there was no longer a Charles Martel to stop them, The Muslim warriors
had traversed immense distances and, in all of Europe, there were, in the
early seventh century, no significant forces that could have stopped them
were it not for the Battle of Tours. Eighteenth-century English historian
Edward Gibbon envisioned the continent’s complete Islamization had
the Franks lost at Tours thus:

A victorious line of march had been prolonged above a thou-
sand miles from the rock of Gibraltar to the banks of the
Loire; the repetition of an equal space would have carried
the Saracens to the confines of Poland and the Highlands
of Scotland; the Rhine is not more impassable than the Nile
or Euphrates, and the Arabian fleet might have sailed with-
out a naval combat into the mouth of the Thames. Perhaps
the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the
schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a

circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation
of Mahomet.”

CHAPTER THREE 95

One twentieth-century European, however, was disappointed that
Charles Martel had defeated the warriors of Islam, for the same reason
that Gibbon was relieved, He exclaimed:

Had Charles Martel not been victorious at Poitiers—al-
ready, you see, the world had fallen into the hands of the
Jews, so gutless a thing was Christianity!—then we should
in all probability have been converted to Mohammedanism,
that cult which glorifies heroism and which opens the sev-
enth heaven to the bold warrior alone. Then the Germanic
races would have conquered the world. Christianity alone
prevented them from doing so.°°

The man expressing that regret was Adolf Hitler.

The Fall of the Umayyads
The setbacks of the Muslims in Central Asia and Western Europe led

to increasing dissatisfaction with the Umayyads, who were finally over-
thrown by a rival clan and an Islamic revivalist movement, the Abbasids,
in 750. The Abbasids gained supporters by arguing that they had a supe-
rior claim to the caliphate than the Umayyads did, as they were members
of Muhammad’s household, descendants of his uncle, Abbas ibn Abd
al-Muttalib, while the Umayyads were descendants of Abu Sufyan, the
Quraysh chieftain who had fought Muhammad at the Battle of Uhud
and the Battle of the Trench.

This line of reasoning, had the Abbasids followed it to its logical
conclusion, would have led them to acknowledge that the Shi'ites had
the best claim of all to the caliphate, as their Imams were descended
from Ali ibn Abi Talib, Muhammad's son-in-law. Of course, they did
not go that far.

The Abbasids also accused the Umayyads of impiety and promised
to rule strictly in accord with the Qur’an and the teachings of Muham-
mad; and so, it was that they defeated the Umayyads in several battles
and finally captured and killed the Umayyad caliph Marwan ibn Mu-

96 Tite History of Jin ap: From MunamMApb TO 1818

hammad on August 6, 750. Abbasid warriors cut off the impious Mar-
wan’s head and sent it as a trophy to the Abbasid caliph, the pious Abu
al-Abbas.*?

Almost immediately, it looked as if Allah was favoring the Abbasids
and blessing their seizure of the caliphate. In July 751, at the Talas River
on the border of present-day Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, the forces of
the new caliphate met those of the Chinese Tang dynasty, in what was to
be the decisive battle for hegemony over Central Asia. China’s Westward
expansion was stopped, and the region was definitively secured for Islam.
The Buddhist and Christian presence in Central Asia went into rapid
decline. The area would be Islamic ever after.

V. UMAYYAD SPAIN

Meanwhile, the Umayyads, vanquished as they were, were not prepared
to vanish from history. Abd al-Rahman, an Umayyad prince and the
grandson of the caliph Hisham ibn Abdel Malik, escaped Abbasid assas-
sination squads and fled to al-Andalus, where he succeeded in gathering
a force of Muslims who did not want to give their allegiance to the Ab-
basids; ultimately, he established himself as emir of Cérdoba and con-
tinued to pursue jihad warfare against the Christian domains in Spain.
The Abbasid caliph Mansur was not willing to take the loss of Spain
lightly, and directed the commander Ala’a ibn Mughith, who was sta-
tioned in North Africa, to invade Spain and destroy the Umayyad up-
start. Abd al-Rahman, however, captured Ala’a ibn Mughith and other
Abbasid commanders. He had each beheaded, and then had their heads
placed in finely decorated boxes that were sent to Mansur. In the box
containing Ala’a ibn Mughith’s head, Abd al-Rahman placed Mansur’s
letter ordering his North African commander to go to Spain and fight
Abd al-Rahman, along with a fragment of the black flag of jihad that
Mansur sent Ala’a ibn Mughith to be his standard. Mansur, receiving
this macabre package, murmured, “Thank Allah there lies a sea between
Abdur Rahman and me,” and made no more attempts to secure Spain

for the Abbasids.*?

CHarterR THREE 97

Charlemagne at Saragossa

The ongoing war between the Christians and Muslims in Spain became
part of Western Europe’s foundational legend and myth. In 778, the
grandson of Charles Martel, Charles, the King of the Franks, who be-
came known to history as Charles the Great or Charlemagne, led an
expedition into Spain at the invitation of a group of Muslim rulers who
would not accept the authority of Abd al-Rahman: Husayn, the governor
of Saragossa; Suleyman al-Arabi, governor of Barcelona and Girona; and
Abu Taur, governor of Huesca. They promised fealty to Charlemagne if
he would aid them against Abd al-Rahman; Charlemagne, like so many
Christian leaders much later lulled into complacency by their Muslim
partners in “interfaith dialogue,” trusted them and went on the march.

When Charlemagne arrived at Saragossa, however, al-Arabi of-
fered him his fealty as promised, but Husayn did not, claiming that he
had never agreed to do so, and the gates of the city were not opened
to him as promised. Charlemagne’s forces laid siege to Saragossa, but
when the Frankish king learned that the Saxons were revolting against
his rule in northern France, he opted to abandon the siege and retreat
across the Pyrenees.

On his way out of Spain, however, Charlemagne’s men destroyed
the walls of Pamplona, the city of the Basques, out of fear that forces op-
posed to the king were coalescing there. In revenge, the Basques, proba~
bly allied with some Muslim forces, ambushed the Franks at Roncevaux
Pass, inflicting more severe losses on Charlemagne than he suffered at
any other time in his career.

Over time, as century after century passed filled with aggression from
the warriors of jihad, the Battle of Roncevaux Pass became in legend a
Muslim ambush on Charlemagne’s retreating army. In the eleventh cen-
tury, three hundred years after the battle, the French epic poem known as
The Song of Roland appeared, describing the heroism of Charlemagne’s
nephew Roland, who is leading the rear guard of Charlemagne'’s forces
and is caught up in the Muslim ambush. Roland has an o/iphant, a horn
made of an elephant’s tusk, which he can use to call for help, but he
initially declines to do so, thinking it would be cowardly. Finally, Roland
does blow his horn. Charlemagne, way ahead of the rear guard, nonethe-
less hears Roland’s horn and hurries back, but it is too late: Roland and

98 THe History oF JIHAD: From MunammMan To ISIS

his men are dead, and the Muslims victorious. Charlemagne, however,
pursues and vanquishes the Muslims, and captures Saragossa.

Thus, the legend. The Song of Roland was enormously popular and
inculcated in the Christians who sang and celebrated it in what came to
be known (in the European Middle Ages) as knightly virtues: loyalty,
courage, and perseverance, even in the face of overwhelming odds. These
were virtues that would be needed if Europe was to hold out against the
ever-advancing jihad.

VI. RAIDING BYZANTIUM

Harun al-Rashid at Chalcedon

Some Christians were ready to display those virtues. In the late 770s,
the Abbasid caliph al-Mahdi traveled to Aleppo, where twelve thou-
sand Christians greeted him with great honor. Al-Mahdi, however, was
not disposed to respond in kind, and told them: “You have two options.
Either die or convert to our religion.” Most of the Christians chose
to die rather than embrace Islam. In and around Baghdad, he noticed
that the Assyrian Christians had built new churches since the Muslim
conquest, in violation of dhimmi laws; he ordered them destroyed; five
thousand Christians in Syria were given the choice of conversion to Is-
lam or death. Many stayed true to their ancestral faith and chose death.

However, loyalty, courage, and perseverance were not always in ev-
idence. In 782, al-Mahdi sent his son, Harun al-Rashid, into Byzan-
tine territory. Harun advanced swiftly, taking seven thousand Christian
slaves and getting all the way to Chalcedon, right across the Bosporus
from Constantinople.** He seemed on the verge of achieving what the
warriors of jihad had tried and failed to do twice before: conquer the
imperial city and destroy the Eastern Roman Empire. However, the
Byzantine logothete Staurakios was able to move Byzantine troops to
a position east of Harun's forces and surround the Muslims, cutting off
their path to return to the caliphate.

Harun’ position seemed desperate, but then he received help from
an unexpected quarter: another in a long and continuing line of short-

CHAPTER THREE 99

sighted and opportunistic non-Muslims who saw the jihad as their
chance to line their pockets or improve their standing. The Byzantine
Empire at this point was riven by the iconoclast controversy: a fierce
dispute over whether it was permissible or proper to create and venerate
images of Christ, the Virgin Mary, and the saints. The Byzantine general
Tatzates, an iconoclast, feared that the iconodule empress regent Irene
was going to dismiss him; she was indeed removing iconoclasts from
positions of influence. In the jihadis’ advance he saw an opportunity:
with Harun’s army encircled, Tatzates deserted and joined the Muslims,
taking much of his army with him.

This momentous desertion was kept secret, so that Harun could use
Tatzates to lure Staurakios and other Byzantine officials to the negotiat-
ing table. When the Byzantines arrived for the negotiations, Harun took
them hostage and used them as bargaining chips to extract favorable
terms from Irene.’ Harun was ultimately able to proceed unmolested
back to Abbasid domains, taking with him a substantial sum of Byzan-
tine gold and Irene’s promise to pay the Muslims seventy thousand di-
nars in yizya each year for the next three years.*° Harun rewarded Tatza-
tes by appointing him governor of Armenia.

During his twenty-three-year reign as Abbasid caliph (786-809),
Harun al-Rashid invaded the Byzantine Empire eight times. Each time,
he demanded the submission of the territories his armies entered and the
payment of the jizya. If the Christians refused, his forces would plunder
the area thoroughly, making sure to take more than they would have
collected in tribute.°? Meanwhile, the jizya still came annually from the
imperial court in Constantinople. In 802, however, the empress Irene
was deposed and exiled, and her successor, Nicephorus, sent envoys to
Harun in Baghdad with a defiant message. It said that Irene “considered
you as a rook, and herself as a pawn. That pusillanimous female submit-
ted to pay a tribute, the double of which she ought to have exacted from
the Barbarians. Restore therefore the fruits of your injustice or abide the
determination of the sword.”*

After they delivered this message to Harun in his legendarily sump-
tuous court in Baghdad, Nicephorus’ messengers threw a bundle of
swords at the caliph’s feet. Harun reacted coolly. He smiled, unsheathed
his scimitar, and declared: “In the name of the most merciful God, Ha-

100 THe History or Jrnap: From MUHAMMAD TO ISIS

run al Rashid, commander of the faithful, to Nicephorus, the Roman
dog. I have read thy letter, O thou son of an unbelieving mother. Thou
shalt not hear, thou shalt behold, my reply.”*

In 806, Harun made good on his threat, leading a massive Muslim
force into the Byzantine Empire. At Cilicia in southern Asia Minor, he
ordered sixteen churches demolished and used their stones to shore up
the fortifications along the border between the caliphate and the Chris-
tian empire.’ Near Samosata in southeast Anatolia, he ordered all the
churches in the area to be destroyed; at Keysun, the Muslims destroyed
a magnificent church with fifteen altars that was said to have been con-
structed by the apostles of Christ themselves. They used the stones to
build a fortress at the town of Hadath."’ At Tyana in Cappadocia, Harun
had a mosque built, a declaration of his intentions to hold and Islam-
ize the land.” And he kept going, destroying not just the Christians’
churches, but also Byzantine fortresses, wherever he could.

Harun advanced with alarming speed across Asia Minor, getting as
far as Heraclea Pontica, just 175 miles from Constantinople. Nicepho-
rus, thoroughly alarmed, saw that he was going to have to eat his words:
it was he, not Harun, who was going to have to abide by the determi-
nation of the sword. He sued for peace and agreed to resume paying
the jizya; Harun, according to the ninth-century Byzantine chroni-
cler Theophanes the Confessor, was immensely pleased, as the money
was a “token that he had subjected the Roman Empire.”* Nicephorus
also agreed not to rebuild the fortresses that the jihadis had destroyed,
but once Harun withdrew, he rebuilt them anyway. Harun, hearing of
Nicephorus’ perfidy, seized the city of Thebasa in Lycoania and the is-
land of Cyprus, where he destroyed all the churches and forcibly reset-
tled the Cypriots elsewhere.

As Harun carried out his jihad campaigns, he heeded the advice of a
Muslim jurist, Abu Yusuf, who advised him:

Whenever the Muslims besiege an enemy stronghold, es-
tablish a treaty with the besieged who agree to surrender on
certain conditions that will be decided by a delegate, and
this man decides that their soldiers are to be executed and
their women and children taken prisoner, this decision is

lawful. This was the decision of Sa’ad b. Mu’adh in con-

CHAPTER THREE 101

nection with the Banu Qurayza. The decision made by the
chosen arbitrator, if it does not specify the killing of the
enemy fighters and the enslavement of their women and
children, but establishes a poll tax, would also be lawful;
if it stipulated that the vanquished were to be invited to
accept Islam, it would also be valid, and they would there-
fore become Muslims and freemen. It is up to the imam to
decide what treatment is to be meted out to them and he
will choose that which is preferable for the religion and for
Islam. If he esteems that the execution of the fighting men
and the enslavement of their women and children is better
for Islam and its followers, then he will act thus, emulating

the example of Sa’ad b. Mu’adh.®

Sad ibn Mu’adh was the Companion of Muhammad who pronounced
the judgment that the men of the Qurayzah Jewish tribe be executed,
and the women and children enslaved, after which Muhammad behead-
ed between six hundred and nine hundred men. |

None of this has become part of the legend of Harun al-Rashid.
According to the historian Karen Armstrong, “Harun al-Rashid was a
patron of the arts and scholarship and inspired a great cultural renais-
sance. Literary criticism, philosophy, poetry, medicine, mathematics and
astronomy flourished not only in Baghdad [where the Abbasids had
placed their capital] but in Kufah, Basrah, Jundayvebar and Harran.”® In
the West, Harun al-Rashid may be the best known of all the caliphs, and
his name is generally associated with cultural advancement, scholarship,
and poetry. After The Arabian Nights brought his name and legend to
the West, he became a mythical philosopher-king on the order of King
Arthur. Alfred Lord Tennyson and William Butler Yeats celebrated him
in verse. Even the novelist Salman Rushdie, in hiding after the Islamic
Republic of Iran offered a reward for his murder for his “blasphemous”
1988 novel The Satanic Verses, followed up in 1990 with Haroun and
the Sea of Stories, in which the two main characters are called Haroun
and Rashid in a tribute to Harun al-Rashid and an Islamic culture that
Rushdie considered more enlightened than that of Ayatollah Khomeini.

Yet, Harun al-Rashid had another side. History does not record how
many Christians and other non-Muslims this most enlightened of ca-

102 Tur History of Jrnap: From MunamMapn To ISIS

liphs subjected to lives of slavery and degradation, or to immediate death
after a defeat in battle. No one at his opulent court looked askance at

this: the subjugation of the conquered peoples was taken for granted. It
was the will of Allah.

VII. MORE JIHAD FORAYS
INTO EUROPE

Hisham at Narbonne

The warriors of jihad had not given up on France. In 791, the Uma-
yyad emir of Cérdoba, Hisham al-Reda, the son of Abd al-Rahman,
declared jihad against the Franks, and determined for good measure to
strike a hard blow against the nagging problem of the Christian King-
dom of Asturias. He led forty thousand jihadis across the Pyrenees and
advanced as far as Narbonne and Carcassone in southern France, but was
unable to go farther or hold the territory. He did, however, carry back an
immense haul of plunder: forty-five thousand gold coins and many en-
slaved Christians. When his men sacked Oviedo, the new capital of the
Kingdom of Asturias, they added even more to the booty. To show his
gratitude to Allah for this bounty, Hisham gave a large part of the gold
to finance the construction of the Great Mosque of Cérdoba.”

The Jihad in Crete and Sicily

By this time, however, the jihad in France was largely over, at least until
the twenty-first century. Elsewhere, however, it was just beginning. In
825, ten thousand Muslims from al-Andalus took to the sea and began
to engage in the jihad of piracy, raiding infidel ships in search of booty
and setting the pattern for jihad pirates down through the ages, includ-
ing the Barbary pirates, who waged war against the newly independent
United States, and the Somali pirates, who terrorized the waters around
east Africa in the twenty-first century. Eventually they landed in Al-
exandria, where they plundered churches and Abbasid mosques, both

CHAPTER THREE 103

considered to be the domains of infidels at war with the rightful Islamic
authority, the Umayyads of Cordoba, and seized and sold six thousand
Christians as slaves.*

Driven out of Alexandria in 827 by the Abbasid caliph al-Ma’mun,
the pirates set their sights on Crete, an outpost of the Byzantine Empire.
The Muslims thought they were merely plundering the island until their
chief, Abu Hafs, took a page from Tariq ibn Ziyad’s book and set fire to
their ships.

The jihadi sailors were enraged. Abu Hafs, however, quickly mol-
lified them, saying: “Of what do you complain? I have brought you to
a land flowing with milk and honey. Here is your true country; repose
from your toils, and forget the barren place of your nativity.”

The jihadis countered: “And our wives and children?”

Abu Hats had a ready answer: “Your beauteous captives will supply
the place of your wives, and in their embraces you will soon become
the fathers of a new progeny.”®? The idea that the Muslims might lose
doesn’t seem to have entered anyone’s mind.

Apparently convinced by Abu Hafs’ promise of “beauteous” spoils
of war, the jihadis began to fight for control of the island. A former
monk who had converted from Christianity to Islam led them to Chan-
dax, an area of the island that was suitable for the construction of a
fortress. The Byzantines were quickly defeated; the Emperor Michael
II the Stammerer, alarmed at the loss of a land so strategically placed
in the Mediterranean, sent several expeditions to recapture Crete, but
none were successful. Abu Hafs established the Emirate of Crete, giv-
ing nominal obeisance to the Abbasid caliph while essentially ruling
on his own. The Emirate of Crete would be a thorn in the side of the
Byzantines for the next century and a half, harassing Byzantine ship-
ping in the eastern Mediterranean and serving as a base for jihad raids
elsewhere, until it was finally recaptured in a Byzantine offensive in 961.

The Muslim conquest of Sicily began the same year as the conquest
of Crete, 827. As with the jihad into Spain, a renegade Christian was its
impetus. According to legend, a young man named Euphemius had be-
come entranced with a young cloistered nun; unable to control himself,
he kidnapped her from her cloister and married her, all against her will.
News of this outrage reached the ears of the emperor Michael himself,

104 Tne History of Jinap: From MunaAmMMAnp To ISIS

who stammered out that the lust-drunk libertine Euphemius must be
punished by having his tongue cut out.”

Euphemius was not resolved to suffer such a punishment in silence.
He fled Sicily, but knew that wherever he went in Byzantine domains, he
was likely to be caught and punished even more severely than Michael
had ordered. He went instead to North Africa, where he appealed for
help from the Muslims, who were happy to oblige. Euphemius returned
to Sicily in style with ten thousand new friends and one hundred ships.
While initially successful, Euphemius and the Muslims soon encoun-
tered fierce resistance, and the traitor Euphemius was killed.

By 829, the jihadi invaders had been almost completely driven off
the island when they received unexpected help: an invading Muslim
army from al-Andalus, led by Asbagh ibn Wakil. Although they ulti-
mately took Palermo, the Muslims were not able to secure the eastern
part of Sicily, stymied both by the ferocity of the native population and
their own inability to unite their various factions. The fighting went on
for decades.

In 878, the Muslims finally took Syracuse, and the booty was im-
mense. According to Gibbon, “the plate of the cathedral weighed five
thousand pounds of silver; the entire spoil was computed at one mil-
lion of pieces of gold [about four hundred thousand pounds sterling]}.”
Along with the treasure, the Muslims enslaved over seventeen thousand
Christians. The exact number is not known, but according to Gibbon,
it exceeded the number of the seventeen thousand Christians who were
captured and sent to Africa to lead lives of slavery when the Muslims
took Taormina.”

The warriors of jihad were finally able to secure complete control of
Sicily in 902, The conquerors treated their new domains with extreme
severity, brutally suppressing the Greek language and forcibly converting
thousands of young boys to Islam.

Jihad in Asia Minor

The successors of Harun al-Rashid continued the jihad against the
Byzantine Empire, but for a considerable period this took the form
of raids into Byzantine territory in Asia Minor, in which the Muslims

CHarter THREE 105

would capture treasure and slaves and then return to the caliphate. In
the 830s, the Byzantine emperor Theophilus asked the Abbasid caliph
al-Ma’mun for a peace accord, but al-Ma’mun’s response hewed to the
Islamic tripartite choice for the People of the Book, and made it clear
yet again that the Muslims were not fighting the Byzantines simply out
of a desire for conquest:

I should make the answer to your letter [the dispatch
of] cavalry horses bearing steadfast, courageous and
keen-sighted riders, who would contend with you over your
destruction [thuklikum], to seek God's favor by spilling
your blood.... They have the promise of one of the two
best things: a speedy victory or a glorious return [to God
as martyrs in battle]. But 1 consider that I should proffer
you a warning, with which God establishes clearly for you
the decisive proof [of Islam], involving the summoning of
you and your supporters to knowledge of the divine unity
and the divine law of the religion of the Aanzfs [pre-Islamic
monotheists]. If you refuse [to accept this offer], then you
can hand over tribute [literally: a ransom] which will entail
the obligation of protection [dimmah] and make incum-
bent a respite [from further warfare]. But if you choose not
to make that [payment or ransom], then you will clearly
experience face-to-face our [martial] qualities to an extent
which will make any effort [on my part] of eloquent speak~
ing and an exhaustive attempt at description superfluous.
Peace be upon him who follows the divine guidance!”

To al-Ma’mun’s bellicose message, Theophilus prudently did not re-
ply. Then, perhaps recalling (or coining) Muhammad’s dictum “War
is deceit,” al-Mamun set out to harass Theophilus in a different way.
In Cilicia in southern Asia Minor, a Christian approached the caliph
and convinced him that he was Theophilus’ son and would be his vas-
sal. Al-Ma’mun gave him a costly bejeweled crown and ordered Job, the
Patriarch of Antioch, to consecrate the imposter emperor of the Ro-
mans. Job, knowing that his choice was to go along with the charade
or be killed, complied, consecrating the new “emperor” with full pomp;

106 Tue History or Jinap: From MuvhHAMMAD TO ISIS

when the Patriarch of Constantinople heard about what had happened,
he excommunicated Job. Al-Ma’mun and his sham Byzantine emperor
kept up the pretense for two years, but when they saw that none of the
Byzantines were falling for the imposture and rising against Theophilus,
they gave it up, and the false emperor converted to Islam.”

In 833, al-Ma’mun ventured into Byzantine territory and made sig-
nificant gains. He retook the city of Tyana for the Muslims, where Ha-
run al-Rashid had built a mosque, but which the Muslims had evacuated
when Nicephorus sued for peace. When he had originally conquered
it in 831, al-Ma’mun had ordered the city destroyed, after which the
Muslims again withdrew from the area. When he took it yet again in
833, however, al-Ma’mun realized its value as a fortress and base for fur-
ther operations against the Byzantines and ordered it rebuilt yet again.
According to the twelfth-century chronicler Michael the Syrian, “He
started to rebuild it through taxes demanded from the country so harshly
that every tongue cursed him.”

Al-Ma’mun, if he heard these imprecations, was undoubtedly un-
moved; it was the will of Allah that the dh1mmi People of the Book pay
for the upkeep and works of the Muslims. But shortly thereafter, the
caliph died suddenly and unexpectedly at the age of forty-seven, after
eating green dates while relaxing on a riverbank.”

Not long thereafter, two Muslim commanders, Nasr and Babak,
converted to Christianity with a portion of their troops and offered
themselves to Theophilus’ service. Theophilus, delighted and embold-
ened, conducted several raids into caliphate territory.

Al-Ma'mun’s successor as caliph, al-Mu'tasim, was enraged. He led
a huge army into Asia Minor, conquered Ancyra (modern Ankara), and
proceeded on to Amorium, a major city at that time, which he put under
siege. After twelve days, a Christian prince named George betrayed the
city, allowing it to fall into al-Mu'tasim’s hands. The caliph gave full
vent to his rage upon the city’s inhabitants. The Muslims raided the
monasteries and took thousands of nuns as sex slaves, killed eighteen
thousand people, and destroyed the city’s churches. Then al-Mu’tasim’s
son Daoud, a devout young man, prevailed upon his father to restrict
the lives of the captive Christians even more than they had been already,
forbidding funeral processions, church bells, the open display of the cross

CHAPTER THREE 107

on church buildings, the public celebration of the Divine Liturgy, and
the consumption of pork.”* With the exception of the last, these became
part of Islamic law for the treatment of Christians in Islamic lands.

Yet even after this, Theophilus again tried to make peace. He sent
the caliph gifts and asked that he exchange Byzantine prisoners for
Muslim ones. Al-Mu'tasim sent the emperor gifts in return but rejected
a one-for-one prisoner exchange: “It is not the Arab custom to exchange
[one] Arab for a Byzantine since the Arabs have greater value. But if you
give up our [people] then I will return many of your people.””

It remains part of Islamic law to this day that the life of a Muslim is
worth more than that of a non-Muslim. A manual of Islamic law certi-
fied as reliable by al-Azhar, the foremost authority in Sunni Islam today,
specifies that “the indemnity paid for a Jew or Christian is one-third the
indemnity paid for a Muslim. The indemnity paid for a Zoroastrian is
one-fifteenth that of a Muslim.””

Theophilus agreed to an unequal prisoner exchange, and for a brief
period there was peace in Asia Minor.

The Jihad in Rome

As the jihad against Sicily continued, Muslims also began jihad raids on
the Italian mainland. In 846, they attacked Rome, the grandest city in
Christendom aside from Constantinople, but were unable to get through
its walls. The basilicas of St. Peter and St. Paul Outside the Walls, how-
ever, as the latter’s name indicated, were outside the city’s defenses. The
jihadis plundered both, taking as much silver and gold as they could,
including a sumptuous silver altar from St. Peter's. But finding Rome's
walls too strong to breach, they continued down the Appian Way to
nearby Fondi, which they plundered, and Gaeta, which they besieged.
Although the jihadis had left the immediate vicinity of Rorne, the
people in the great city were thoroughly alarmed. Despite the Muslims’
inability to break through into the heart of the city, the Romans criti-
cized Pope Sergius for not doing enough to keep the city safe. When he
died in 847, his successor, Pope Leo IV, swiftly began shoring up Rome’s
defenses, building new walls and repairing the existing ones, as well as
repairing the damage the Muslims had done to St. Peter's and St. Paul's.

108 THe History OF Jinap: From MunaAMMAD TO ISIS

That all this was necessary was taken for granted by everyone. The
jihad forces were still in Italy, and the threat was urgent; it had not yet
become customary for the Roman Pontiff to proclaim the peacefulness
of Islam and benign character of the Qur'an, and to decry the building
of walls. If anyone had been skeptical about the need for Pope Leo’s new
walls, they were no longer so in 849, when Muhammad Abu'l Abbas, the
emir of the Aghlabid dynasty that ruled in North Africa, ostensibly un-
der the authority of the Abbasid caliph, sent a fleet to the mouth of the
Tiber River, just sixteen miles from Rome. Leo, however, had formed an
alliance with several Italian princes, as well as with the Byzantines, and
a significant Christian force was there to meet the forces that the Chris-
tians called the Saracens. In battle at Ostia, a district of Rome, and aided
by a storm that destroyed much of the Muslim fleet, the Christians were
victorious, and the conquest and Islamization of Rome was prevented, at
least for the foresceable future.

Elsewhere, the Christians were not so fortunate. Gibbon recounted
the habitual savagery of the conquerors:

It was the amusement of the Saracens to profane, as well
as to pillage, the monasteries and churches. At the siege of
Salerno, a Mussulman chief spread his couch on the com-
munion-table, and on that altar sacrificed each night the
virginity of a Christian nun. As he wrestled with a reluctant
maid, a beam in the roof was accidentally or dexterously
thrown down on his head; and the death of the lustful emir
was imputed to the wrath of Christ, which was at length
awakened to the defence of his faithful spouse.”

Enforced subjugation

Meanwhile, the Christians who were living in the domains of the caliph-
ate demonstrated why it was so important for the Christians elsewhere
to resist the jihadi onslaught. The eleventh-century Muslim historian
al-Maliki noted that in the ninth century, a gadi (Sharia court judge)
“compelled the dhimmis to wear upon their shoulder a patch of white
cloth [riga’] that bore the image of an ape [for the Jews] and a pig [for

CraprTer THREE 109

the Christians], and to nail onto their doors a board bearing the sign of
a monkey.”*°

These were not singular instructions issued at only one time and in
one location. In 850, the caliph al-Mutawakkil issued a decree designed
to make sure that the dhimmis knew their place, and that the Muslims
knew how to keep them in their place:

It has become known to the Commander of the Faithful that
men without judgment or discernment are seeking the help of
dhimmis in their work, adopting them as confidants in prefer-
ence to Muslims, and giving them authority over the subjects.
And they oppress them and stretch out their hands against
them in tyranny, deceit, and enmity. The Commander of the
Faithful, attaching great importance to this, has condemned
it and disavowed it. Wishing to find favor with God by pre-
venting and forbidding this, he decided to write to his offi-
cers in the provinces and the cities and to the governors of the
frontier towns and districts that they should cease to employ
dhimmis in any of their work and affairs or to adopt them as
associates in the trust and authority conferred on them by the
Commander of the Faithful and committed to their charge...

Do not therefore seek help from any of the polytheists
and reducc the people of the protected religions to the sta-
tion which God has assigned to them. Cause the letter of the
Commander of the Faithful to be read aloud to the inhabi-
tants of your district and proclaim it among them, and let it
not become known to the Commander of the Faithful that
you or any of our officials or helpers are employing anybody
of the protected religions in the business of Islam.”!

Al-Mutawakkil was not innovating. He was extrapolating all of this from
the directions of the Qur’an itself: “Let not believers take disbelievers as
friends and protectors rather than believers. And whoever does that has
nothing to do with Allah, except when taking precaution against them
in prudence.” (3:28)

The caliph was determined to ensure that the dhimmis lived in a
constant state of humiliation, as befitting those who had rejected the

X

110 THe History oF Jinap: From MunammMan To ISIS

truth of Allah and his prophet, and to be readily recognizable for what
they were, so that they would not be mistakenly accorded respect by
an unwitting Muslim. While he issued the decree above, according to
Tabari, the caliph also:

..-gave order that the Christians and the dhzmmis in gener-
al be required to wear honey-colored hoods and girdles; to
ride on saddles with wooden stirrups and two balls attached
to the rear; to attach two buttons to the caps of those who
wear them and to wear caps of a different color from those
worn by the Muslims; to attach two patches to their slaves’
clothing, of a different color from that of the garment to
which they are attached, one in front on the chest, the oth-
er at the back, each patch four fingers in length, and both
of them honey-colored. Those of them who wore turbans
were to wear honey-colored turbans. If their women went
out and appeared in public, they were only to appear with
honey-colored head scarfs. He gave orders that their slaves
were to wear girdles and he forbade them to wear belts.
He gave orders to destroy any churches which were newly
built, and to take the tenth part of their houses. If the place
was large enough it was to be made into a mosque; if it was
not suitable for a mosque it was to be made into an open
space. He ordered that wooden images of devils should
be nailed to the doors of their houses to distinguish them
from the houses of the Muslims. He forbade their employ-
ment in government offices and on official business where
they would have authority over the Muslims. He forbade
their children to attend Muslim schools or that any Mus-
lim should teach them. He forbade the display of crosses
on their Palm Sundays and Jewish rites in the streets. He
ordered that their graves be made level with the ground so
that they should not resemble the graves of the Muslims.®

CHAPTER THREE 111

VIII. SEIZING THE STONE

The Qarmatians at Mecca

In the second half of the ninth century, the jihad against infidels largely
gave way to a jihad against Muslim rivals. The Abbasid caliphate was be-
set with internal strife, with four caliphs ruling between 861 and 870, as
rival factions vied for power. In the mid ninth century, the Abbasids were
so weakened by their internal divisions that the Byzantines were able to
go on the offensive and recapture the provinces of Illyricum, Greece,
Bulgaria, Northern Syria, Cilicia, and Armenia, which they had previ-
ously lost to the jihad.®

Despite all their dissension and disunity, however, the Abbasids still
had the time and energy to continue to persecute the Shi'ite minority.
The caliph al-Mutawakkil forced the tenth Shi'ite Imam, Ali ibn Mu-
hammad al-Naqi, to move from his home in Medina to Samarra, which
the Abbasids had made their capital in 836. Once he had him close by,
Al-Mutawakkil had al-Naqi mistreated, ridiculed, and tortured. Al-Mu-
tawakkil died in 861, but the persecution continued until the caliph al-
Muttazz bi-’lah had al-Naqi poisoned to death in 868.** His successor as
Imam of the Shi’a, Hasan ibn Ali al-Askari, lived under house arrest in
Samarra until his death, also by Sunni poisoning, in 874.

Shi'ite tradition holds that the prophecy that the twelfth Imam
would be the Mahdi, the savior figure of Islam awaited by both Sunnis
and Shi'ites, was widely known—so al-Askari was kept under wraps lest
he father a son who could claim that title.*° Shi’ites believe, however, that
he managed to have a son anyway, although there are differing traditions
about who his wife was and where she was from, and no one is sure how
she got to the Imam under the watchful eyes of the Sunnis.

However it happened, the twelfth Imam, Muhammad ibn Hasan
al-Mahdi, was born, and great things were expected of him. However,
his father was killed when he was just four years old and, soon afterward,
the long-awaited boy himself disappeared—probably also murdered by
Sunnis, like most of the Imams before him. In the Shiite view, however,
he went into “occultation,” unable to be seen by ordinary human eyes but
still very much alive. Four men known as his special deputies claimed to

112 Tue History of Jinap: From MuHAMMAD TO ISIS

be in contact with him, and they led the Shi'ite community for the next
seventy years, always in an atmosphere of persecution from the Sunnis.
The return of the twelfth Imam, and the triumph of the Shi’a over the
Sunnis and all infidels, became a staple of Shi'ite apocalyptic literature.

Meanwhile, a schism among the Shi'ites caused more trouble for
the Abbasids. The sixth Imam, Jafar al-Sadiq, who reigned from 733 to
765, designated his son Ismail ibn Jafar as his successor. Ismail, however,
died before Jafar did, and so Jafar was succeeded by his brother, Musa
ibn Jafar al-Kazim. However, a party of the Shiites believed that since
their Imams were infallible, Ismail was the rightful successor of Jafar, as
Jafar would not have designated him otherwise, and that the Imamate
belonged not to Musa, but to Ismail’s son Muhammad ibn Ismail.

This Shi'ite group came to be known as the Ismailis, and they were
beset by internal divisions as well. In the late ninth century, one group of
Ismailis—known as Qarmatians, after their founder Hamdan Qarmat—
preached an apocalyptic vision centered upon the imminent return of
Muhammad ibn Ismail as the Mahdi, the savior figure of Islamic apoc-
alyptic literature. The Qarmatians were fierce and fanatical, seeing even
the pilgrimage to Mecca as idolatrous, because while there the pilgrims
venerated the Black Stone of the Ka’aba, the sacred meteorite that Allah,
it was said, had thrown down to that spot from Paradise.®

In 899, the Qarmatians captured Hajr, the capital of Bahrain, and
established Bahrain as their stronghold, setting up a utopian society with
no Friday services and, indeed, no mosques at all; apparently, they jet-
tisoned Islamic practices in anticipation of the Mahdi’s arrival and the
consummation of all things.®’ Thirty thousand black slaves did the work,
and another twenty thousand served as the army. No taxes were levied,
as the community relied on plunder for its sustenance. The Qarmatians
were energetic in pursuing that plunder: the Qarmatians began raiding
the caravans of pilgrims to Mecca. In 906, they killed twenty thousand
pilgrims who were returning from Mecca, and in 924 massacred another
pilgrim caravan, They also began seizing Abbasid strongholds, sacking
Kufa in 925 and coming close to taking Baghdad in 927."

In 928, the Qarmatians struck their mightiest blow yet against Ab-
basid power: they stormed Mecca and stole the Black Stone from the
Ka’aba, carrying what they considered a focus of idolatry back to Bah-

CHAPTER THREE 113

rain. The theft of the Black Stone signified, the Qarmatians said, the
end of Islam and the commencement of the age of the Mahdi. They
were, however, willing to return it for a ransom back to Mecca, but the
Abbasids never made any effort to pay up.

Finally, in 950, on the orders of the Fatimid Shiite caliph who had
established himself in Cairo and whose authority they had accepted,
the Qarmatians threw the Black Stone into the Great Mosque of Kufa
in central Iraq, along with a note saying, “By command we took it, and
by command we have brought it back.”*? It had been in three pieces
when it was taken; perhaps from the impact of being thrown into the
mosque, it had now broken into seven, but fragmentary or no, it was
still the Black Stone, or the closest thing to the Black Stone that any-
one actually possessed.

The Abbasids, no doubt breathing a sigh of relief that it had finally
been returned to Kufa, restored it to its place for veneration at the Ka’aba
in Mecca. And that was that. Abbasid power was severely shaken, but
the jihad imperative remained and would eventually be taken up again.

PDF created by Rajesh Arya - Gujarat

CHAPTER FOUR

CONSOLIDATION AND
OPPRESSION

Jihad in the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries

I. THE JIHAD IN SPAIN

Islam in Power in Spain

The jihad in Spain slowed down considerably in the late ninth and ear-
ly tenth centuries. In fact, the Christian domains in Spain were grow-
ing, but very slowly and amid many setbacks. As in all wars, long and
short, matters became complicated; on occasion, Christians and Mus-
lims forged alliances for short-term goals. Whatever the utility of these
coalitions of convenience, and however successful they were, the jihad
imperative remained a constant, and there was never any shortage of
Muslims in al-Andalus who were ready to pursue it.

In 920, the forces of the Emirate of Cordoba routed the Christians
of the Kingdom of Leén, the successor to Pelayo’s Kingdom of Astur-
ias, at Valdejunquera. But those who were determined to resist the jihad
were by no means wiped out, and they fought on.

From 929 on, the Umayyad rulers of Spain styled themselves as ca-
liphs of Cérdoba. That caliphate, and Islamic al-Andalus in general, has
become a potent myth in the twenty-first century. Historians have paint-
ed it as a paradise of protomulticulturalism: Karen Armstrong, author
of Islam: A Short History, claims that “until 1492, Jews and Christians
lived peaceably and productively together in Muslim Spain—a coexis-

116 Tue History or Jinap: From MunamMMap To JSIS

tence that was impossible elsewhere in Europe.”' Historian Maria Rosa
Menocal asserts that the Muslim rulers of Spain “not only allowed Jews
and Christians to survive but, following Quranic mandate, by and large
protected them.”

This myth has come to be taken for granted in the West. In his June
4, 2009, outreach speech to the Muslim world from Cairo, U.S. president
Barack Obama said: “Islam has a proud tradition of tolerance. We see it
in the history of Andalusia.”*

Yet, Umayyad Spain was hardly a comfortable place for the Chris-
tians and Jews who were subjugated there under the rule of Islam. Sev-
eral decades after the Umayyads proclaimed their caliphate in Cordoba,
the Holy Roman emperor Otto I sent an emissary, John of Gorze, to
Muslim Spain. John of Gorze noted that the Christians of al-Andalus
were living in fear and suffering under the burden of systematic discrim-
ination.* But when he proposed informing Otto ] about the plight of the
Christians in al-Andalus, a Spanish bishop told him that to do so would
only make matters worse. “Consider,” he told John, “under what condi-
tions we live. We have been driven to this by our sins, to be subjected to
the rule of the pagans. We are forbidden by the Apostle’s words to resist
the civil power. Only one cause of solace is left to us, that in the depths
of such a great calamity they do not forbid us to practise our own faith....
For the time being, then, we keep the following counsel: that provided
no harm is done to our religion, we obey them in all else, and do their
commands in all that does not affect our faith.”

Dhimmis throughout the ages have enunciated a similar philosophy:
just stay quiet, or matters will get even worse. Islamic law forbade the
dhimmis to complain about their state, on pain of forfeiting their con-
tract of “protection”, dhimmi communities, therefore, learned to put up
with the most humiliating degradation in silence, for fear that if they
said anything about their condition to anyone, it would only become
even more precarious and dangerous.

Even Menocal grants that the lives of the dhbimmis in al-Andalus
were severely restricted:

The dhimmi, as these covenanted peoples were called, were
granted religious freedom, not forced to convert to Islam.
They could continue to be Jews and Christians, and, as it

CHAPTER Four 117

turned out, they could share in much of Muslim social and
economic life. In return for this freedom of religious con-
science the Peoples of the Book (pagans had no such priv-
ilege) were required to pay a special tax—no Muslims paid
taxes—and to observe a number of restrictive regulations:
Christians and Jews were prohibited from attempting to
proselytize Muslims, from building new places of worship,
from displaying crosses or ringing bells. In sum, they were
forbidden most public displays of their religious rituals.°

The Umayyad laws were designed to emphasize that Muslims had the
dominant position in society, and that the Christians of Spain were de-
cidedly inferior.’ It was made unpleasant, expensive, and dangerous to
live daily life as a Christian, so that the victory and supremacy of Islam
was readily observable and regularly reinforced. DAimmi Christians also
knew that all they had to do to end this daily discrimination and sporad-
ic harassment and persecution was convert to Islam.

Many did convert, because it was miserable to live as a Christian
in al-Andalus. Christians could never be sure that they would not be
harassed. One contemporary account tells of priests being “pelted with
rocks and dung” by Muslims while on the way to a cemetery.® The
dhimmus also suffered severe economic hardship. Paul Alvarus, a ninth-
century Christian in Cordoba, complained about the “unbearable tax”
that Muslims levied on Christians.’

Nor could Christians say anything about their lot, because it was
proscribed by Islamic law, and criticizing Islam, Muhammad, or the
Qur’an in any manner was a death-penalty offense.’ In 850, Perfectus,
a Christian priest, engaged a group of Muslims in conversation about
Islam; his opinion of the conquerors’ religion was not positive. For this,
Perfectus was arrested and put to death. Not long thereafter, Joannes, a
Christian merchant, was said to have invoked Muhammad’s name in his
sales pitch. He was lashed and given a lengthy prison sentence."? Chris-
tian and Muslim sources contain numerous records of similar incidents
in the early part of the tenth century. Around 910, in one of many such
episodes, a woman was executed for proclaiming that “Jesus was God
and that Muhammad had lied to his followers.”"”

118 THe History or Jinan: From MuthaAMMAD TO ISIS

The Christians outside of the caliphate did not forget their op-
pressed brethren, and there were periodic confrontations, large and
small, between those who wanted to restore Christian Spain and the
warriors of jihad who continued to strike out at the resistance they were
facing in conquering the northern portion of the Iberian Peninsula for
Allah. In 939, the Christians under the leadership of King Ramiro II of
Leon met the forces of jihad under the command of Abd al-Rahman
III, the caliph of Cérdoba, at Simancas (also known as Alhandega) in
northwestern Spain.

Abd al-Rahman was a scrupulous, doctrinaire Muslim ruler. The
eleventh-century Muslim historian Ibn Hayyan of Cordoba recounted:

God protected the people of al-Andalus, preserving their
religion from calamities thanks to...the Prince of the Be-
lievers [Abd al-Rahman III]...whom [God] wanted as a
Caliph...who followed in the steps of his ancestors, adher-
ing closely to Scripture and proclaiming the Sunnah...so
that no devilish heresy would arise that he would not de-
stroy, no flag of perdition was raised that he did not humble,
so that with him God kept the community of Islam togeth-
er, obedient, peaceful.... He expelled innovation and gath-
ered in his capital [Cordoba] the most perfect culture of the
times, as never before existed, and he attended to matters
of religion, investigating the behavior of the Muslims...and
their gatherings in the mosques by means of spies whom
he ordered to penetrate the most intimate secrets of the
people, so that he could know every action, every thought
of good and bad people, and...the explicit and hidden views
of the different groups of the population.... God showered
gifts upon him...because of his keeping of the law and his
subjugating of men, so they sang his praise and his defense
of the people’s hearts against heresy...following the true
and witnessed traditions [ahadith] attributed to greatest of
all Imams, Malik ibn Anas, Imam of the people of Medi-
na.... [These traditions] are the ones that have benefited
this country, and purified the people from those tenden-
cies which [Abd al-Rahman III] punished in those who

CHAPTER Four 119

held them, and he ordered his zalmedina [Muslim judge
in charge of patrolling the public spaces to enforce Sharia]
Abdallah b. Badr, his mawla, to interrogate the accused and
carry out an Inquisition against them...terrifying them and
punishing them severely."

It is not surprising, considering his careful adherence to Islamic law, that
Abd al-Rahman III was harsh with his Christian prisoners. Ibn Hayyan
detailed a typical incident:

Muhammad [one of the officers of Abd al-Rahman III]
chose the 100 most important barbarians [that is, Chris-
tians] and sent them to the alcazar of Cérdoba, where they
arrived Friday, 7 of the ywmada 1 [March 2, 939], but since
an-Nasir [Abd al-Rahman III] was vacationing in the or-
chard of an-Naura [La Noria], they were taken there, their
marching coinciding with the people’s exiting from the alja-
ma mosque of Cérdoba, upon the conclusion of the Friday
prayer, so that many gathered and followed to see what end
the prisoners would have, and it turned out that an-Nasir
was installed on the upper balcony over the orchard facing
the river...to watch the execution. All the prisoners, one by
one, were decapitated in his presence and under his eyes, in
plain sight of the people, whose feelings against the infi-
dels Allah alleviated, and they showered their blessings on
the Caliph. The death of these barbarians was celebrated in
a poem by Ubaydallah b. Yahya b. Idris [one of the many
sycophantic intellectuals in the pay of the Umayyads who
relentlessly praised their greatness], saying:

Defeated the prisoners arrived,

Carried and shackled by A//aA,

Like an angry lion you looked at them,

Surrounded by wild lions and dragons,

And in plain sight of everyone your sword annihilated them,
Among blessings and praises to A//ah."*

120 Tue History of Jinap: From MunHamMaApb TO ISIS

Abd al-Rahman III was also notorious for his cruelty toward the ddim-
mis. Ibn Hayyan related one sadly representative incident:

I must say that I have heard from ulama, generationally
close to that dynasty [the Umayyads], about the brutal-
ity of an-Nasir li-din [that is, “the defender of the faith
of AJlah,” Abd al-Rahman IJ]] towards the women that
were under his protection and discretion, similar to what
he showed in public toward men, according to the word of
the principal ones among his most intimate servants—eu-
nuchs who lived in his house and witnessed his personal
life: a female slave who was one of his most highly regard-
ed favorites, but whose haughty personality did not bend
easily to his vanity, having remained with him alone in one
of his leisure days to drink in the garden of az-Zahra [a
palace that Abd al-Rahman JI had built for his favorite
sexual slave that contained three hundred baths, four hun-
dred horses, fifteen thousand eunuchs and servants, and a
harem of 6,300 women], sitting by his side until drinking
had an effect on him, and he threw himself upon her face
to kiss and bite her, and she got disgusted by this and
turned her face away, raining on his parade; this so pro-
voked his anger that he ordered the eunuchs to seize her
and put a candle to her face, burning and destroying her
beauty...until they destroyed her face, burning her badly
and finishing with her—one of his worst actions.!

The tenth-century Catholic nun Hrotsvitha von Gandersheim recorded
that Abd al-Rahman also happened upon a thirteen-year-old Christian
boy who had been taken hostage. Entranced by the boy’s beauty, the ca-
liph made amorous advances upon him, only to be rejected; enraged, he
had the boy tortured and then beheaded."

On another occasion, another one of Abd al-Rahman’s sex slaves found
herself bearing the brunt of the caliph’s anger. Ibn Hayyim recounted:

His executioner, Abu Imran [Yahya], whom he always had
at the ready with his “instruments,” said that one night he

CHAPTER Four 121

called him to his room in the palace of an-Naura, where
Yahya had slept with his sword and leather floor mat. [Ya-
hya] then entered the room where [Abd al-Rahman III}
was drinking and found him squatting, like a lion sitting on
his paws, in the company of a girl, beautiful like an onyx,
who was being held by his eunuchs in a corner of the room,
who was asking for mercy, while he answered her in the
grossest manner. He then told [Yahya] “Take that whore,
Abu Imran, and cut her neck.” [Yahya] said, “I procrasti-
nated, asking him again, as was my custom, but he told me,
“Cut it, so may A//ah cut your hand, or if not, put down
your own [neck].” And a servant brought her close to me,
gathering up her braids, so that with one blow I made her
head fly; but the strike of the blade made an abnormal
noise, although I had not seen it hit anything else [but the
neck]. Afterwards they took away the body of the girl, I
cleaned my sword on my leather mat, I rolled up the mat,
and I left; but when I entered my own room and I unfolded
the mat, there appeared in it pearls big and shiny, mixed
with jacinths and topazes that shone like red-hot coals, all
of which I gathered in my hands and I hurried to take it
to an-Nasir; he rejected it immediately and told me, “We
knew they were there, but we wanted to give them to you
as a gift; take it and may Allah bless it to you.” And with it
I bought this house.”

Abd al-Rahman II] was no more merciful toward his own people.
According to Ibn Hayyan, “I must also mention a horror with which
an-Nasir terrorized people, which was by means of lions to make their
punishment even more terrible, an action more proper of the tyrannical
kings of the Orient, in which he imitated them, having the lions brought
to him by the little kings on the North African coast, since they are not
animals proper to al-Andalus.”

The eleventh-century Muslim cleric Ibn Hazm of Cérdoba added

that Abd al-Rahman’s cruelty sometimes had a racial element:

122

In a small bit of retribution for all this savagery, Abd al-Rahman III and
the Muslims were badly beaten at Simancas, and the jihadi army utterly
wiped out. Abd al-Rahman II] managed to escape with his life, but al-
though he remained caliph of Cérdoba until his death in 961, he never
again led the warriors of jihad onto the field of battle against the infidels.

Tre History or Jinap: From MuwamMMAD To ISIS

Abd al-Rahman an-Nasir was not far from his great grand-
father al-Hakam b. Hisam in the way he threw himself
into sin and committed doubtful acts, abusing his subjects,
giving himself cynically to pleasure, punishing with cruelty
and caring little for the effusion of blood. He was the one
who hanged the sons of the blacks from the well of his pal-
ace as a sort of counterweight to draw water, making them
die; and he had his impudent buffoon Rasis in a cortege,
with sword and helmet, when in fact she was a shameless
old woman, not to mention other hideous things, that 4//as
knows better.”

This was no indication, however, that he blamed himself for the
disaster at Simancas, Upon his return to Cérdoba after the defeat, the
caliph ordered the crucifixion of three hundred of his top officers.”° Ibn
Hayyan recounted that he ordered an attic built above the highest floor

of one wing of his palace, specifically for this purpose:

He put almenas [turrets] and ten door-like openings in
it... Having prepared ten high crosses, each one placed in
front of each door of the attic, an arrangement that awed
the people, who did not know his purpose, and therefore
more people came to watch than ever before. When the
army arrived, he ordered the zalmedina to arrest 10 of the
principal officers of the army, the first ones to break ranks
on the day of Alhandega, who were there in the ranks,
whom he named and ordered to be placed on the cross-
es, which was done by the executioners right away, leaving
them crucified, among their supplications for mercy and
pardon, which only increased his anger and insults, while
letting him know they had let him down.”

CHAPTER Four 123

Crucifixion was the punishment the Qur’an prescribed (5:33) for those
who “make war upon Allah and his messenger”; apparently Abd al-Rah-
man considered that they had done that by their incompetent manage-
ment of the battle against the Christians at Simancas. An onlooker later
recalled: “I was caught in the midst of the crowd...1 turned away my
eyes, almost fainting with horror at the sight...and such was my state,
that a thief stole my pack [without my noticing it].... It was a terrible
day that scared people for a long time afterwards.””

However, even with the decimation of the caliphate’s army, the
Christians were too riven by infighting to take full advantage of the sit-
uation. The caliphate of Cordoba continued to exist, and to “strike terror
in the enemies of Allah,” as the Qur’an ordered (8:60). In 981, the de
facto Cérdoban ruler Almanzor, who had usurped the caliph’s powers,
sacked Zamora and killed four thousand Christians, leveling a thousand
Christian villages and destroying their churches and monasteries.”

This roused the twenty-year-old King Ramiro III of Leon, who had
become king at age five upon the death of his father, Sancho the Fat,
to action. But Almanzor was far more experienced, knowledgeable, and
ruthless than Ramiro, who showed how outmatched he was as Almanzor
defeated him three times in quick succession.”* Emboldened by victory,
Almanzor began conducting regular jihad raids into Christian lands. In
985, he sacked Barcelona; the following year, he destroyed Leén, burn-
ing monasteries as he went.”

As he pursued the jihad against the Christian domains of northern
Spain, Almanzor also determined to enhance the glory of his capital.
He set a squadron of Christian slaves, their legs in irons, to the task
of expanding and beautifying the Great Mosque of Cordoba.” In 997,
he destroyed Santiago de Compostela, the city that housed the famous
shrine of St. James, known as Santiago Matamoros, or St. James the
Moor-Slayer. As the warriors destroyed the shrine, they saved the gates
and bells for the mosque at Cérdoba; Islam forbade bells, but they could
be melted down and put to other uses. Newly enslaved Christians, cap-
tured at Santiago de Compostela, carried these precious spoils back to
Cérdoba on their shoulders.”

Almanzor continued to pursue the jihad against the Christians of
Spain with consistent success, becoming notorious among the Chris-

124 Tue History or Jinav: From MunHAMMAD YO JTSTS

tians of Spain as he did so; when he died, a Christian monk, bitter over
the devastation he had wrought upon the native population of Spain,
wrote him a succinct epitaph: “Almanzor died in 1002; he was buried
hel”

After the death of Almanzor, there was no leader of comparable
strength ready to take his place. The Muslims in Spain were beset with
infighting. Berbers from North Africa entered Spain and challenged
Umayyad authority; taking Cordoba in 1013, they began massacring
Jews, and initiated a wholesale slaughter of Jews in Granada.”

The caliphate of Cérdoba came to an end in 1031, as the last Uma-
yyad caliph, Hisham III, was imprisoned and exiled, and the Muslim
chieftains who ruled the various regions of Muslim Spain could not
agree on a successor. Al-Andalus henceforth became a collection of small
Muslim emirates and fiefdoms. In the early 1060s, King Fernando I of
Leén won a series of victories over the four most important of these
small Muslim states (¢aifas): Zaragoza, Toledo, Badajoz, and Valencia.
In a turnabout of the jizya, he forced them to pay tribute. In 1064, he
successfully laid siege to the fortress city of Coimbra and freed most of
Portugal from Islamic rule.*® After he died, those who were grateful for
his stand against the jihad began to refer to him as Ferdinand the Great.

Pogrom in Granada

Meanwhile, the disarray, lack of central authority, and overall weakness
of Muslim Spain in the middle of the eleventh century led to no lessen-
ing of the plight of religious minorities, since that plight was mandated
in the core texts of Islam.

Jews in al-Andalus sometimes had it even worse than Christians
did. In the middle of the eleventh century, a Jew named Samuel ibn
Naghrila gained the trust of the Muslim rulers and was granted politi-
cal power in Granada. Later, Samuel’s son Joseph also held positions of
great honor and responsibility. Islamic law mandated that a non-Muslim
could not hold authority over a Muslim, but as with all legal systems,
there are some people who flout the rules and periods of relaxation in
which the rules are simply ignored.

CHAPTER Four 125

However, the Muslims in Granada knew Islamic law and were con-
siderably resentful of the power of Samuel, and later of Joseph.*! The
Muslim jurist Abu Ishaq composed verses addressed to the Berber king
Badis that vividly demonstrate the Muslim conviction that Muslims
must enjoy a place superior to that of the dhimmis, who must endure a
state of humiliation. Of Granada’s Muslim ruler, Abu Ishaq wrote:

He has chosen an infidel as his secretary / when he could,
had he wished, have chosen a Believer. / Through him,
the Jews have become great and proud / and arrogant—
they, who were among the most abject. / And have gained
their desires and attained the utmost / and this happened
suddenly, before they even realized it. / And how many a
worthy Muslim humbly obeys / the vilest ape among these
miscreants. / And this did not happen through their own
efforts / but through one of our own people who rose as
their accomplice. / Oh why did he not deal with them,
following the example set by worthy and pious leaders? /
Put them back where they belong / and reduce them to
the lowest of the low, / Roaming among us, with their little
bags, / with contempt, degradation and scorn as their lot,
/ Scrabbling in the dunghills for colored rags / to shroud
their dead for burial... / These low-born people would not
be seated in society / or paraded along with the intimates
of the ruler..,./ God has vouchsafed in His revelations / a
warning against the society of the wicked. / Do not choose
a servant from among them / but leave them to the curse
of the accurst! / For the earth cries out against their wick-
edness / and is about to heave and swallow all. / ‘Turn your
eyes to other countries / and you will find the Jews are out-
cast dogs. / Why should you alone be different and bring
them near / when in all the land they are kept afar?... / I
came to live in Granada / and I saw them frolicking there.
/ They divided up the city and the provinces / with one of
their accursed men everywhere. / They collect all the rev-
enues, / they munch and they crunch. / They dress in the
finest clothes / while you wear the meanest. / They are the

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trustees of your secrets, / yet how can traitors be trusted? /
Others eat a dirham’s worth, afar, / while they are near and
dine well..../ Their chief ape has marbled his house / and
led the finest spring water to it. / Our affairs are now in his
hands / and we stand at his door. / He laughs at God and
our religion..../ Hasten to slaughter him as an offering, /
sacrifice him, for he is a precious thing..../ Do not consider
it a breach of faith to kill them, / the breach of faith would
be to let them carry on. / They have violated our covenant
with them..../ God watches His own people / and the peo-
ple of God will prevail.*

Abu Ishaq referred to the Jews as “apes” because the Qur'an depicts Al-
lah transforming Sabbath-breaking Jews into apes and pigs (2:63-65;
5:59-60; 7:166).

The Muslims of Granada heeded Abu Ishaq’s call. On December
30, 1066, rioting Muslims, enraged by the humiliation of a Jew ruling
over Muslims, murdered four thousand Jews in Granada. The maddened
Muslim mob crucified Joseph ibn Naghrila and plundered the homes of
the Jews.*?

The Almoravids and El Cid

The Christians continued to advance in Spain. In a major defeat for
Islamic al-Andalus, the forces of King Alfonso VI of Castile and Leén
captured Toledo, the old capital of Visigothic Spain, in 1085. The leaders
of the various ¢azfas, alarmed, in 1086 called for help from the Almora-
vids, a Berber Muslim dynasty that had taken control of Morocco and its
environs in the middle of the eleventh century.

The Almoravids, fearsome in appearance for their practice of wear-
ing veils over the lower half of their faces, which they did to protect
themselves from the twin threats of desert sands and evil spirits, entered
Spain swiftly. Their king, Yusuf ibn Tashfin, sent a messenger to Alfonso
VI, offering him the standard Islamic choices for the People of the Book:
conversion to Islam, submission to the hegemony of the Muslims, or
war.’ Alfonso wrote back a contemptuous refusal; when Yusuf received

CuarreR Four 127

the paper containing this message, he turned it over and wrote on the
back, “What will happen, you shall sce.”*®

What Alfonso saw was nothing that he wanted to see. The battle,
at the village of Sagrajas north of Badajoz, was an unmitigated disaster
for the Christians. Alfonso lost over half of his army, When it was over,
the Muslims beheaded the Christian corpses and arranged their heads
into piles; the muezzins then climbed atop the piles of heads to call the
Muslims to prayer, displaying once again in the blood and gore of the
Christians’ heads the victory and superiority of Islam.*

Yusuf and the Almoravids had stopped the momentum of the Chris-
tians in Spain and ensured that Islamic al-Andalus would endure. But
the whole situation was nonetheless unprecedented. The forces of jihad
had never had this much trouble holding a territory they had conquered
for Islam, and seldom, if ever, would again. Even as the Almoravids
united the ¢aifas under their rule and continued to wage jihad against
the Christians, the Muslims were still quite often on the defensive. The
Christians were determined not to let Spain be Islamized, and they kept
pushing against the Muslim domains.

Alfonso VI was thus determined even in defeat. In the wake of the
disaster, he sent out appeals for help to Christian leaders all over Spain
and France, warning them that the Almoravid advance deeply endan-
gered Christianity in Spain, and asking them to come join him in the
defense of Christendom. Alfonso sent one of these appeals to Rodrigo
Diaz de Vivar, a Castilian warrior with whom Alfonso had a long history.

Rodrigo had been a Castilian commander under King Sancho II of
Castile, the son of Fernando I, Ferdinand the Great. Fernando had been
king of Castile and Leén; when he died, Sancho became king of Castile,
and his brother Alfonso became king of Ledn. (A third brother, Garcia,
became king of Galicia.) Sancho, suspecting that Alfonso intended to
make war upon his two brothers and unite their kingdoms under his rule,
struck preemptively: his commander Rodrigo defeated Alfonso in battle,
and Sancho became king of Leon as well as Castile.

Soon afterward, however, Sancho was murdered. Since he had no
children, his kingdoms passed into the possession of his eldest brother,
who was none other than the one he had just warred against and de-
posed, Alfonso. Rodrigo and a group of other Castilian noblemen then

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forced Alfonso to swear, solemnly and repeatedly, that he had not been
involved in Sancho’s murder. Alfonso had no choice but to comply, but
his heart began to burn in bitter resentment toward those who had hu-
miliated him—principally Rodrigo, whom he eventually exiled.

Rodrigo was a Christian. He knew well what the warriors of jihad
had in store for the Christians of Spain. But the Christian king whom
he had served had exiled him. Whether out of necessity or a desire for
revenge, or both, Rodrigo offered his services to Yusuf al-Mu’taman ibn
Hud, the king of the Muslim saifa of Zaragoza. He fought so valiantly
in the service of the Muslims that they began to call him El Sayyid (The
Master), which in Spanish folklore became EF] Cid.

By that name, El Cid, Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar has become one of
the great heroes of Spanish history, and the central figure of the Cantar
de Mio Cid, the renowned Spanish epic poem. For when he received
Alfonso’s appeal, he returned and again took up the struggle against the
Almoravids. He took the city of Valencia from the Muslims, and in 1097
defeated the jihadis decisively at Bairén, near Gandia in southeast Spain.

When El] Cid died in 1099, the Christians of Spain controlled
two-thirds of the Iberian Peninsula. The momentum of the jihad had
been decisively broken. And the impetus for more initiatives against the
Muslims came continuously from the systematic mistreatment of the
Christians who still lived in the Islamic domains. Even when they were
not facing active persecution, if Christians and Jews didn't abide by the
restrictions placed upon them as dhimmis, they could in accordance with
the Sharia be lawfully killed or sold into slavery,*’

Around 1100, the Muslim governing official and poet Ibn Abdun
detailed the rules for dhimmis in Seville:

A Muslim must not act as a masseur to a Jew or Christian;
he must not clear their rubbish nor clean their latrines, In
fact, the Jew and the Christian are more suited for such
work, which are degrading tasks. A Muslim must not act
as a guide or stableman for an animal owned by a Jew or
Christian; he must not act as their donkey-driver or hold
the stirrups for them. If it be noticed that a Muslim contra-
venes these prohibitions, he shall be rebuked...

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It is forbidden to sell a coat that once belonged to a leper,to
a Jew or Christian, unless the buyer is informed of its origin;
likewise, if this garment once belonged to a debauched person.

No tax-officer or policeman, Jew or Christian may be al-
lowed to wear the dress of an aristocrat, nor of a jurist, nor of
a wealthy individual, on the contrary they must be detested
and avoided. It is forbidden to accost them with the greeting
“Peace be upon you [as-salam alayka}!” In effect, “Satan has
gained the mastery over them, and caused them to forget
God's Remembrance. Those are Satan’s party; why, Satan’s
party, surely they are the losers!” (Koran 58:20) A distinctive
sign must be imposed upon them in order that they may be
recognized and this will be for them a form of disgrace.

The sound of bells must be prohibited in Muslim ter-
ritories and reserved only for the lands of the infidels...

It would be preferable not to let Jewish or Chisiatian
physicians be able to heal Muslims.**

If the dbimmis violated any of these provisions or any of the others that
enforced and reminded them daily of their subjugation, they could be
sold into slavery. In 1126, several thousand Christians were sent to Mo-
rocco to serve as slaves. Once again, the Muslim leadership was acting
within the bounds of its right to kill or enslave dhimmis who violated the
terms of their protection agreement.”

Indeed, Umayyad Spain became a center of the Islamic slave trade.
Muslim buyers could purchase sex-slave girls as young as eleven years
old, as well as slave boys for sex as well, or slave boys raised to become
slave soldiers. Also for sale were eunuchs, useful for guarding harems.”
Blonde slaves seized in jihad raids on Christian nations north of al-
Andalus were especially prized, and fetched high prices. Slave traders
would use makeup to whiten the faces and dye to lighten the hair of
darker slaves, so that they could get more money for them.”!

A twelfth-century witness of the sale of sex slaves described the market:

The merchant tells the slave girls to act in a coquettish
manner with the old men and with the timid men among
the potential buyers to make them crazy with desire. The

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merchant paints red the tips of the fingers of a white slave;
he paints in gold those of a black slave; and he dresses them
all in transparent clothes, the white female slaves in pink
and the black ones in yellow and red.”

If the girls did not cooperate, of course, they would be beaten or killed.

The Andalusian slave market became particularly important in the
eleventh century, when two of the other principal markets from which
the Muslims drew slaves, Central Asia and southeastern Europe, dried
up. The Slavs by this time had converted to Christianity and were no
longer interested in selling their people as slaves to Islamic traders. In
Central Asia, meanwhile, the Turks had converted to Islam. The primary
market for slaves among Muslims was for non-Muslims, as enslaving
fellow Muslims was considered a violation of the Qur’an’s requirement
to be “merciful to one another” (48:29); hence Muslim slave traders had
to look elsewhere for merchandise.”

II. THE JIHAD IN INDIA

Quiescence, Not Reform

Outside of Spain, the jihad, at least against infidels, was relatively quiet
during the tenth century, as the Abbasids struggled to hold on to their
domains, battling not only the Qarmatians but the Shi'ite Fatimid ca-
liphate that had been established in 909 and ultimately wrested much of
North Africa and the Middle East from Abbasid control.

That the jihad against unbelievers went through a period of relative
quiet was not due to any reform in Islam, or to reconsideration or re-
jection of the exhortations in the Qur’an and the teachings of Muham-
mad to wage war against and subjugate unbelievers. It wasn’t pursued
as relentlessly as it had been in the seventh and eighth centuries solely
because the various Muslim factions were preoccupied with infighting,
such that they did not have the resources to carry the battle to the infi-
dels the way they once had done. But the jihad would be taken up again

CHAPTER Four 131

as soon as any significant number of Muslims had the will, the unity, and
sufficient resources to do so.

The Jihad Against India

At the beginning of the eleventh century, there arose 2 Muslim com-
mander who was like Tariq ibn Ziyad in two important ways: he was full
of zeal for Islam, and had the valor and ruthlessness to bring that zeal to
jihad warfare. His name was Mahmud of Ghazni (971-1030), a native of
Khurasan who revived the long-dormant jihad against India and greatly
extended Islam's presence on the subcontinent. For thirty years, Mah-
mud terrorized non-Muslims in what is today northeast Afghanistan,
Pakistan, and northwest India.**

In 994, Mahmud became governor of Khurasan. Bestowing upon
himself the title of sultan (governmental power), Mahmud swiftly began
to expand his domains—all in the name of Islam.*® Mahmud’s domains
were nominally under the suzerainty of the Abbasid caliph; when Mah-
mud secured the caliph al-Qadir bi-’Llah’s recognition in 999, he pledged
annual jihad raids against India.*® He didn’t manage to invade that fre-
quently, but he did lead seventeen large-scale jihad incursions into the
subcontinent.”

The thirteenth-century Muslim historian Minhaj al-Siraj Juzjani,
author of the Tabagat-1 Nasiri, a history of Jslam’s rise, noted that as
Mahmud waged jihad in India, “he converted so many thousands of idol
temples into masjids [mosques].”** Mahmud broke the idols whenever
he could, so as to demonstrate the power of Islam and the superiority of
Allah to the gods of the people of India. When he defeated the Hindu
ruler Raja Jaipal in 1001, he had Jaipal “paraded about in the streets so
that his sons and chieftains might see him in that condition of shame,
bonds and disgrace; and that the fear of Islam might fly abroad through
the country of the infidels.””

Mahmud of Ghazni made an immense effort to conquer Gujarat,
according to Zakariya ibn Muhammad, another thirteenth-century
Muslim historian, because he hoped that if he was able to destroy Guja-
rat utterly, its inhabitants would be shocked and demoralized into sub-
mission, and would convert to Islam en masse.*° The people of Gujarat,

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however, did not submit but resisted, and fifty thousand were killed.*!
Entering one Hindu temple in Gujarat, Mahmud was overcome with
anger at seeing the idols; raising his battle-axe, he hit one with full force,
breaking it into pieces. The pieces were carried to Ghazni and placed
at the threshold of the mosque as a sign of the victory of Islam over the
idols and the superiority of Allah to them.°*

Mahmud proceeded with a massive army of jihadis to Thanessar
in Hindustan, where he had heard that there was a magnificent temple
in which was placed an idol, Jagarsom, that people from all over the
region venerated. Anandapala, the Hindu ruler of the Shahi dynasty in
modern-day eastern Afghanistan and northern Pakistan, heard of Mah-
mud’s advance and sought to make peace, sending an envoy to Mahmud
offering the Sultan fifty elephants if he would abandon the jihad against
Jagarsom. Mahmud ignored the offer, but when he and his men arrived
in Thanessar, they found the city entirely empty of people.

Nonetheless, there was plenty to plunder. The Muslims roamed the
empty streets, seizing and destroying all the idols from the temples. They
transported Jagarsom to Ghazni, where Mahmud ordered that the now
broken idol be set in front of the mosque, so that the Muslims would
trample upon its pieces on their way in and out for prayer.**

The Kitab i Yamini, an eleventh-century account of Mahmud of
Ghazni’s reign up to 1020 by the Muslim historian Abu Nasr Muham-
mad al-Utbi, contains another account of Mahmud’s attacking Tha-
nessar, apparently during one of his other invasions of India. Al-Utbi
recorded that the leader of Thanessar “was obstinate in his infidelity
and denial of God. So the Sultan marched against him with his valiant
warriors, for the purpose of planting the standards of Islam and extir-
pating idolatry.”™

Mahmud and his jihadis showed no mercy: “The blood of the infi-
dels flowed so copiously that the stream was discoloured, notwithstand-
ing its purity, and people were unable to drink it. Al-Utbi was sure
this was a sign of the divine favor upon the Muslims: “The victory was
gained by God’s grace, who has established Islam forever as the best of
religions, notwithstanding that idolaters revolt against it.”

The same historian boasted that Mahmud “purified Hind from
idolatry, and raised mosques therein,” but the Sultan wasn’t finished. In

CHAPTER Four 133

1013, he marched with a large jihadi army toward Lahore, the capital
of Hindustan, where he found a Buddhist temple. Inside the temple
was a stone bearing an inscription saying, according to al-Utbi, “that the
temple had been founded fifty thousand years ago.” Mahmud of Ghaz-
ni “was surprised at the ignorance of these people, because those who
believe in the true faith represent that only seven thousand years have
clapsed since the creation of the world.”*”

Mahmud and his men went on to Nandana, the capital of the Kabul
Shahi kingdom under King Anandapal. Here again, the jihadis slaugh-
tered the population indiscriminately and destroyed the temples. Al-Ut-
bi recounted: “The Sultan returned in the rear of immense booty, and
slaves were so plentiful that they became very cheap and men of respect-
ability in their native land were degraded by becoming slaves of common
shopkeepers. But such is the goodness of Allah, who bestows honour on
his own religion and degrades infidelity.”

Five years later, Mahmud entered Hindustan again and marched to-
ward the fortress of Mahaban. Al-Utbi said that “the infidels...deserted
the fort and tried to cross the foaming river...but many of them were

slain, taken or drowned.... Nearly fifty thousand men were killed.”*”

Then at Mathura, al-Utbi added, “the Sultan gave orders that all
the temples should be burnt with naptha and fire, and levelled with the
ground.”® At Kanauj, the Muslim historian continued, “there were near-
ly ten thousand temples.... Many of the inhabitants of the place fled in
consequence of witnessing the fate of their deaf and dumb idols. Those
who did not fly were put to death. The Sultan gave his soldiers leave to
plunder and take prisoners.”*' Then, at Shrawa, “the Muslims paid no
regard to the booty till they had satiated themselves with the slaughter
of the infidels and worshippers of sun and fire. The friends of Allah
searched the bodies of the slain for three days in order to obtain booty....
The booty amounted in gold and silver, rubies and pearls nearly to three
thousand dirhams, and the number of prisoners may be conceived from
the fact that each was sold for two to ten dirhams. They were afterwards
taken to Ghazni and merchants came from distant cities to purchase
them, so that the countries of Mawaraun-Nahr, Irag and Khurasan were
filled with them, and the fair and the dark, the rich and the poor, were

commingled in one common slavery.”

134 Tue History or Jinap: From MuwamMMap To ISIS

A3-Utbi concluded with satisfaction that Mahmud of Ghazni
“demolished idol temples and established Islam. He captured...cities,
killed the polluted wretches, destroying the idolaters, and gratifying
Muslims. He then returned home and promulgated accounts of the
victories he obtained for Islam.” Mahmud repeated the vow he had
made to the Abbasid caliph that “every year he would undertake a holy
war against Hind.”

In 1023, Mahmud prayed to Allah for assistance and invaded India
again, this time with a force of thirty thousand jihad warriors on horse-
back." After crossing a desert, the Muslims came upon a fort, inside of
which were wells and abundant water. The people inside the fort came
out and tried to appease Mahmud’s wrath, but the sultan was having
none of it: he killed all the inhabitants and broke their idols into pieces.”

According to Minhaj al-Siraj Juzjani, “He led an army to Nahr-
walah of Gujarat, and brought away Manat, the idol, from Somnath, and
had it broken into four parts, one of which was cast before the entrance
of the great Masjid at Ghaznin, the second before the gateway of the
Sultan's palace, and the third and fourth were sent to Makkah and Ma-
dinah respectively.”

In Somnath there was a magnificent temple of Shiva; Manat was
the name of one of the pre-Islamic goddesses of Mecca. It was rumored
among the Muslims that when Muhammad cleansed the Ka’aba of its
pre-Islamic idols and transformed it into a Muslim shrine, and idol wor-
ship was extinguished in Arabia, an idol of Manat was transported to
India and set up in the temple in Somnath. Thus Mahmud, in destroying
this temple, was doing something particularly great in Muslim eyes, as
he was extinguishing the last remnant of Arabian idol worship and com-
pleting a job begun by none other than Muhammad himself.®

In any case, the spoils, in both treasure and human beings, were
once again immense: Ghazni was filled with stolen Indian goods that
the jihadis had appropriated, and even though the Muslims killed fifty
thousand people at Somnath, Hindu slaves were again so plentiful that
they sold for as little as two or three dirhams.”

The Muslim advance was relentless. Conquering a fortress of Bhim,
a Gujarati king, Mahmud and the Muslims plundered it thoroughly,
carrying away one hundred gold and silver idols. Mahmud had one of

CHAPTER Four 135

the more impressive and splendid golden images melted down to make
grand new gold doors for the mosque of Ghazni, replacing the old iron
ones.” At Mathura in Uttar Pradesh, Mahmud stripped the Hindu tem-
ples of all their gold and silver and then had all the temples set ablaze.”

Triumphant, Mahmud had coins minted that proclaimed: “The
right hand of the empire, Mahmud Sultan, son of Nasir-ud-Din Subuk-
Tigin, Breaker of Idols.””! Like that of Harun al-Rashid, Mahmud’s court
became a center of culture and learning, with the sultan patronizing sci-
entists and poets, including the renowned Ferdowsi.” This element of
Mahmud’s legacy tends to be remembered in the contemporary West
more than his bloody ventures into India.

Mahmud of Ghazni died in 1030, having made immense gains
for Islam in the Punjab and Sindh, and establishing a foothold also in
Kashmir and Gujarat. His son Masud followed in his footsteps. In 1037,
Masud led a jihad force into Hindustan and sacked the Hindu fort of
Hansi. According to the eleventh-century Tartkh-us-Subuktigin, “The
Brahmins and other high-ranking men were slain, and their women and
children were carried away captive, and all the treasure which was found
was distributed among the army.””

During all of his jihad ventures into India, however, Mahmud had
neglected to protect his home base, and by the time Masud ventured
into India in 1037, Ghazni itself was vulnerable. While Masud and his
men were enjoying this great jihad victory, the Seljuk Turks, who had
converted to Islam in the late tenth century, sacked Ghazm and overran
most of Masud’s Western domains. The jihad against India would come
to a halt, albeit, as always, only temporarily.

II]. THE SHVITE FATIMID CALIPHATE

In the early tenth century, Ismaili Shi’a claiming descent from Fatima,
Muhammad’s daughter, secured control of large expanses of North Af-
rica, and later over Egypt and the Levant. The Fatimid caliphate existed
in an almost perpetual state of jihad against its Sunni neighbors, but it
imposed the strictures of dhimmitude upon its non-Muslim subjects no
less rigorously than they did. In the early twelfth century, the Fatimid
caliph Al-Amir bi-Ahkamillah issued this edict:

136

Tue History or Jiuap: From MunammMand TO ISIS

Now, the prior degradation of the infidels in this world be-
fore the life to come—where it is their lot-—is considered an
act of piety; and the imposition of their poll tax [jizya], “un-
til they pay the tribute out of hand and have been humbled”
(Koran 9:29) is a divinely ordained obligation. As for the
religious law, it enjoins the inclusion of all the infidels in the
payment of the jizya, with the exception, however, of those
upon whom it cannot be imposed; and it is obligatory to
follow in this respect the line laid down by Islamic tradition.

In accordance with the above, the governors of the
provinces in their administration must not exempt from the
Jjizya a single dhimmi, even if he be a distinguished mem-
ber of his community; they must not, moreover, allow any
of them to send the amount by a third party, even if the
former is one of the personalities or leaders of their com-
munity. The dhimmz’s payment of his dues by a bill drawn
ona Muslim, or by delegating a real believer to pay it in his
name will not be tolerated. It must be exacted from him di-
rectly in order to vilify and humiliate him, so that Islam and
its people may be exalted and the race of infidels brought
low. The jizya is to be imposed on all of them in full, with-
out excepton.”4

IV. THE JIHAD IN ASIA MINOR

In the early tenth century, the patriarch of Constantinople Nicholas I
Mystikos made an early attempt at interfaith outreach, writing to the
Abbasid caliph Mugtadir in cordial terms: “The two powers of the whole
universe, the power of the Saracens and that of the Romans, stand out
and radiate as the two great luminaries in the firmament; for this reason
alone we must live in common as brothers although we differ in customs,

manners and religion.””

Like later attempts at interfaith outreach, this one was for naught.

The jihad continued.

CHAPTER Four 137

The End of Christian Rule in Asia Minor: Armenia

The Seljuks took Baghdad in 1055. The Abbasids, essentially power-
less in the face of growing Seljuk power, granted the Seljuk leaders the
title of sultan; the Seljuk sultans paid nominal fealty to the Abbasid
caliphs and set out to amass a considerable empire, taking up the jihad
against infidels.

The Christians made this easier for them than it might have been
by fighting among themselves, In the middle of the eleventh century, the
Byzantines seized a substantial portion of Armenia, primarily because
they believed that this mountainous region of northeastern Asia Minor
would serve as an effective barrier against the warriors of jihad.

The Armenian historian Aristakes Lastivertsi (1002-1080) recalled
with anguish the harshness of the invaders:

In these days Byzantine armies entered the land of Armenia
four times in succession until they had rendered the whole
country uninhabited through sword, fire, and captive-tak-
ing. When I think about these calamities my senses take
leave of me, my brain becomes befuddled, and terror makes
my hands tremble so that I cannot continue my composi-
tion. For it is a bitter narration, worthy of copious tears.”

Even worse, the Byzantine emperor Constantine IX, frustrated with
the continued resistance of the Armenians, secretly contacted the Seljuk
sultan Tugrul Beg in 1044 and urged him to attack the Armenian capi-
tal, Ani.” Meanwhile, the Byzantines began a systematic persecution of
the Armenians. This was because the Armenians held to Monophysite
Christianity, which had been declared a heresy by the Council of Chal-
cedon in 451, to which the Byzantines adhered. The Byzantine perse-
cution of the Armenians became so severe that many Armenian troops
upon which the Byzantines were relying to man the border defenses
deserted their posts, leading Lastivertsi to lament: “The cavalry wanders
about lordlessly, some in Persia, some in Greece, some in Georgia.””
Some Armenians even joined the Seljuks in their jihad raids into Byz-

antine territory.”

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While all of this was going on, a portion of the Byzantine army re-
belled against the emperor Michael VI. The warriors of jihad were only
too happy to exploit all of this internal dissension among the Christians.
Noted Lastivertsi: “As soon as the Persians realized that [the Byzantine
nobles] were fighting and opposing one another, they boldly arose and
came against us, ceaselessly raiding, destructively ravaging.””°

By “Persians,” he was referring to the Seljuk Turks. In 1048, they
seized the Armenian city of Ardzen. According to Matthew of Edes-
sa, a twelfth-century Armenian chronicler, the rampaging jihadis killed
150,000 people, and Matthew lamented “the sons taken into slavery, the
infants smashed without mercy against the rocks, the venerable old men
abased in public squares, the gentle-born virgins dishonoured and car-
ried off.”*! This was the kind of treatment Constantine LX was inviting
when he had urged Tugrul Beg to attack Ani.

Constantine IX died in 1055, so he did not live to see his wish ful-
filled, but it was fulfilled indeed, and in a manner that visited yet more
horror upon the Armenians: in 1064, Tugrul Beg’s successor as sultan
of the Seljuks, Muhammad bin Dawud Chaghri, who for his exploits
in jihad earned the honorific Alp Arslan, or Heroic Lion, besieged Ani.

The Armenians, whatever their distaste for the Byzantines may have
been, knew that their treatment at the hands of the Muslims would be
worse, and initially resisted with everything they had. But the siege last-
ed for twenty-five days, and the people of Ani grew progressively more
desperate. At one point they sent their comeliest young men and women
out to Alp Arslan, hoping to appease him with this sumptuous offering
of sex slaves; the jihad commander, however, would not turn aside from
his goal. Once the Muslims broke through the city’s defenses, they were
merciless. The thirteenth-century Muslim historian Sibt ibn al-Jawzi re-
counted the testimony of an eyewitness:

The army entered the city, massacred its inhabitants, pil-
laged and burned it, leaving it in ruins and taking prison-
er all those who remained alive.... The dead bodies were
so many that they blocked the streets; one could not go
anywhere without stepping over them. And the number of
prisoners was not less than 50,000 souls. I was determined

CHAPTER Four 139

to enter the city and see the destruction with my own eyes. I
tried to find a street in which I would not have to walk over
the corpses; but that was impossible.”

The Debacle at Manzikert

Something even worse was coming. In 1071, Alp Arslan besieged the
Byzantine fortress of Manzikert, in eastern Asia Minor, but was not
trying to provoke a large-scale war with the Byzantines, whose history,
going back to Julius Caesar and before that, was legendary, and whose
immense might was respected. The Eastern Roman Empire of the late
eleventh century was just a shadow of that former glorious entity, but
the extent of its weakness was not yet fully known. In any case, instead
of engaging with the Byzantines and risking a disaster, Alp Arslan
turned south, determined to confront and destroy the Ismaili Shi'ite
Fatimid caliphate.

Alp Arslan was besieging Aleppo when the news came that the
Byzantine emperor Romanos IV Diogenes was heading east from Con-
stantinople with a massive force. The sultan hurriedly broke off his siege
and headed north, losing a good bit of his army along the way: the ji-
hadis who had been looking forward to the spoils that would come from
the plunder of Aleppo knew that the haul would be substantially smaller
for defeating a Byzantine army in a dusty outpost of Asia Minor, away
from any major city, advancing without their treasure and without their
women. A substantial number of the Seljuk forces peeled off.

But Romanos’ army, which was made up of a large number of for-
eign mercenaries, was growing smaller as well. The eleventh-century
Byzantine historian Michael Attaleiates recounted that as the imperial
army traveled eastward, Romanos began to alienate his own men: “He
became a stranger to his own army, setting up his own separate camp and
arranging for more ostentatious accommodation.”™

Discontent was growing in the Byzantine ranks, and it was com-
pounded by confusion: Alp Arslan had extraordinarily good intelligence
on the ground in Asia Minor, and knew exactly where Romanos and his
forces were and where they were heading at any given time; by contrast,

140 THe History oF Jinap: From MunaAmMapD To JSIS

the Byzantines did not have the vaguest idea of where the jihadis were,
or of how many of them there were, until it was far too late.®

The Byzantine forces were routed. Romanos himself was captured.
Brought before Alp Arslan, Romanos was exhausted from the battle, his
once fine clothes tattered and covered with dust. Alp Arslan couldn't be-
lieve that this bedraggled prisoner was the Byzantine emperor; once he
was convinced, however, he ordered Romanos to kiss the ground before
him, and then put his foot on the defeated sovereign’s neck.®

The humiliation of the emperor, however, was little more than a
ritual formality, a public demonstration of the victory and supremacy
of Islam. Once it was completed, Alp Arslan ordered that Romanos be
treated with the respect due his station. He was, after all, still the emper-
or of the Romans, even if captured.

However, worse was in store for Romanos. Alp Arslan asked him
what he would do if the tables were turned: “What would you do if I was
brought before you as a prisoner?”

The emperor responded frankly: “Perhaps I'd kill you, or exhibit you
in the streets of Constantinople.”

To that, Alp Arslan said: “My punishment is far heavier. ] forgive
you, and set you free.”*”

Alp Arslan was not being ironic. He was completely serious: it would
have been a far Jighter punishment for Romanos to have been killed at
Manzikert than to have returned to his imperial capital. This became
immediately clear when Romanos did return to Constantinople. The
Byzantine army was devastated and Asia Minor essentially defenseless
before the Seljuk advance, all because of Romanos’ decision to confront
the Seljuks at Manzikert.

His rivals in Constantinople immediately took advantage of his
weakness; Romanos was deposed and blinded, and he died of his wounds
soon thereafter. His legacy was nothing like anything he would have
been able to endure imagining: his failure at Manzikert enabled Asia
Minor, which had been populated by the Greeks since time immemorial,
ultimately to become Turkey, and before that the seat of the last great
Islamic caliphate, in which the native Greeks and Armenians were dhim-
mis, living precariously under the overlordship of Islam.

CHAPTER Tour 141

The Aftermath of Manzikert

Alp Arslan did not take immediate advantage of his victory, but it was
only a matter of time. The Byzantine presence in Asia Minor was histo-
ry, and for them, the situation was going to get worse still. In 1076, the
Turks conquered Syria; in 1077, Jerusalem. Victorious, the Seljuk emir
Atsiz bin Uwaq promised not to harm the inhabitants of Jerusalem, but
once the jihadis had entered the city, they murdered three thousand peo-
ple.** Meanwhile, in 1075, Seljuk sultan Suleymanshah established the
sultanate of Rum (Rome, referring to the New Rome, Constantinople)
with its capital in Nicaea, the once great Christian city that had been the
site of two ecumenical councils of the Church and was perilously close to
Constantinople itself.’ From here they continued to threaten the Byz-
antines and harass the Christians all over their new domains.

The situation was desperate, and desperate times called for desper-
ate measures. Back in 1054, the Church of Rome and the Church of
Constantinople, after having had a rocky relationship with each other
for centuries, issued mutual excommunications, and what came to be
known as the Great Schism between the Eastern and Western Churches
began. Necessity, however, tended to make the differences between the
two seem less important than the more pressing matter of simple surviv-
al, at least for the Byzantines.

The emperor Alexius 1 Comnenus, who reigned from 1081 to 1118,
fought back against the Seljuk advance and met with some success, but
he didn’t have the resources to follow through to victory, and the Turkish
presence in Asia Minor was like a knife at the empire's throat. Accord-
ingly, in 1095, Alexius sent envoys to Piacenza in northern Italy, where
the Church of Rome was holding a synod. Addressing the assembled
bishops and eminent laymen, the Byzantine ambassadors explained the
situation and the need, and asked for help, stressing that to come to the
aid of the venerable Christian empire would be a great service to God
and the Church.

Pope Urban II and his entourage listened intently and were in-
trigued. The envoys had come at a time when the leaders of Western
Europe were quite concerned with what was happening in the East. Be-
sides helping the Byzantines, the Westerners were interested in liberat-
ing Jerusalem, where Christians had suffered for centuries. A few exam-

142 Tue History or JtHaAD: From MunamMMap ro ISIS

ples: in the early eighth century, sixty Christian pilgrims from Amorium
were crucified; around the same time, the Muslim governor of Caesaria
seized a group of pilgrims from Iconium and had them all executed as
spies—except for a small number who converted to Islam; and Muslims
demanded money from pilgrims, threatening to ransack the Church of
the Resurrection if they didn’t pay. Later in the eighth century, a Muslim
ruler banned displays of the cross in Jerusalem. He also increased the
jizya that Christians had to pay and forbade them to engage in religious
instruction of their own children and fellow believers.”

In 772, the caliph al-Mansur ordered Christians and Jews in Jeru-
salem to be stamped on their hands with a distinctive symbol. In 789,
Muslims beheaded a monk who had converted from Islam and plundered
the Bethlehem monastery of St. Theodosius, killing many more monks. In
the early ninth century, the persecutions grew so severe that large numbers
of Christians fled to Constantinople and other Christian cities. Fresh per-
secutions in 923 saw more churches destroyed, and in 937, Muslims went
ona rampage in Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, plundering and destroying the
Church of Calvary and the Church of the Resurrection.”!

In the 960s, the Byzantine general Nicephoras Phocas (a future em-
peror) carried out a series of successful campaigns against the Muslims,
recapturing Crete, Cilicia, Cyprus, and even parts of Syria. In 969, he
recaptured the ancient Christian city of Antioch. The Byzantines ex-
tended this campaign into Syria in the 970s.”

Saif al-Dawla, ruler of the Shi'ite Hamdanid dynasty in Aleppo
from 944 to 967, launched annual jihad campaigns against the Byzan-
tines. He appealed to Muslims to fight the Byzantines on the pretext
that the Byzantines were taking lands that belonged to the House of
Islam. This appeal was so successful that jihadis from as far off as Central
Asia joined the jihads.™

In 1004, the sixth Fatimid caliph, Abu Ali al-Mansur al-Hakim
(985-1021) turned violently against the faith of his Christian mother
and uncles (two of whom were patriarchs) and ordered the destruction
of churches, the burning of crosses, and the seizure of church property.
He moved against the Jews with similar ferocity. Over the next ten years,
thirty thousand churches were destroyed, and untold numbers of Chris-
tians converted to Islam simply to save their lives. In 1009, al-Hakim

CHAPTER FOUR 143

gave his most spectacular anti-Christian order: he commanded that the
Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem be destroyed, along with
several other churches (including the Church of the Resurrection). The
Church of the Holy Sepulcher, rebuilt by the Byzantines in the seventh
century after the Persians had burned an earlier version, marks the tra-
ditional site of Christ’s burial. Al-Hakim commanded that the tomb
inside be cut down to the bedrock. He ordered Christians to wear heavy
crosses around their necks (and Jews heavy blocks of wood in the shape
of a calf). He piled on other humiliating decrees, culminating in the
order that Christians accept Islam or leave his dominions,”

The erratic caliph ultimately relaxed his persecution and even re-
turned much of the property he had seized from the Church.” Never-
theless, Christians were in a precarious position, and pilgrims remained
under threat. In 1056, the Muslims expelled three hundred Christians
from Jerusalem and forbade European Christians from entering the
Church of the Holy Sepulcher.”® The disaster at Manzikert followed a
decade and a half after that. The Byzantine Empire's subsequent loss
of Asia Minor made it all the more urgent, as far as Pope Urban II was
concerned, for the Christians of the West to act to defend their brethren
in the East. It was a necessity born of charity.

Outside of the Reconquista in Spain, which would not fully realize
its goal for three hundred more years, the Crusades were the first signif-
icant attempt to reverse the gains of the jihad.

PDF created by Rajesh Arya - Gujarat

CHAPTER FIVE

THE VICTIMS OF JIHAD
STRIKE BACK

Jihad in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries

I. THE CRUSADES

Calling the First Crusade

Pope Urban II called the First Crusade at the Council of Clermont in
1095, saying that without military action, “the faithful of God will be

much more widely attacked” by Muslim forces:

For your brethren who live in the cast are in urgent need
of your help, and you must hasten to give them the aid
which has often been promised them. For, as most of you
have heard, the Turks and Arabs have attacked them and
have conquered the territory of Romania [the Greck em-
pire] as far west as the shore of the Mediterranean and the
Hellespont, which is called the Arm of St. George. They
have occupied more and more of the lands of those Chris-
tians and have overcome them in seven battles. They have
killed and captured many and have destroyed the churches
and devastated the empire. If you permit them to continue
thus for awhile with impunity, the faithful of God will be
much more widely attacked by them. On this account J, or
rather the Lord, beseech you as Christ’s heralds to pub-

146 THe History oF Jinan: From MunaAmmap To ISIS

lish this everywhere and to persuade all people of whatever
rank, foot-soldiers and knights, poor and rich, to carry aid
promptly to those Christians and to destroy that vile race
from the lands of our friends... Moreover, Christ com-

mands it.!

The Pope spoke of an “imminent peril threatening you and all the faith-
ful which has brought us hither”:

From the confines of Jerusalem and from the city of Con-
stantinople a grievous report has gone forth and has repeat-
edly been brought to our ears; namely, that a race from the
kingdom of the Persians, an accursed race, a race wholly
alienated from God, ‘a generation that set not their heart
aright and whose spirit was not steadfast with God,’ vio-
lently invaded the lands of those Christians and has depop-
ulated them by pillage and fire. They have led away a part
of the captives into their own country, and a part...they
have killed by cruel tortures. They have either destroyed
the churches of God or appropriated them for the rites of
their own religion. They destroy the altars, after having de-
filed them with their uncleanness.... The kingdom of the
Greeks is now dismembered by them and has been deprived
of territory so vast in extent that it could be traversed in two
months’ time.... This royal city, however, situated at the
center of the earth, is now held captive by the enemies of
Christ and is subjected, by those who do not know God, to
the worship [of] the heathen. She seeks, therefore, and de-
sires to be liberated and ceases not to implore you to come
to her aid. From you especially she asks succor, because as
we have already said, God has conferred upon you above all
other nations great glory in arms.’

He invoked the Muslim destruction of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher:
“Let the holy sepulcher of our Lord and Saviour, which is possessed by un-
clean nations, especially arouse you, and the holy places which are now treat-
ed with ignominy and irreverently polluted with the filth of the unclean.”3

CHAPTER Five 147

The People’s Crusade

The Crusades initially came together as pilgrimages: Crusaders em-
barked on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, intending to defend them-
selves if attacked. Many took religious vows. Indeed, the first Crusader
foray into Muslim lands, the so-called People’s Crusade, was more reli-
gious revival meeting than military force. [t began with preaching, as a
charismatic preacher known as Peter the Hermit traversed France and
Germany with a scorching message of hellfire and redemption and the
necessity of the Crusade.

As Peter preached, he began to attract followers—women and chil-
dren as well as soldiers. The “People’s Crusaders” crossed Europe and ar-
rived in Constantinople in August 1096, by then thirty thousand strong.
Entering the domains of the Turks, they were quickly massacred near
Nicaea, while Peter the Hermit was still in Constantinople discussing
strategy with Alexius Comnenus. The principal Crusader force of actual
military men had not yet even arrived in the region.’

As the People’s Crusaders crossed Europe, Peter the Hermit be-
came famous and attracted imitators. Many of these new Crusade lead-
ers, however, were not interested primarily in defending the Christians
in the Middle East, but in lining their own pockets at the expense of
the Jews of Germany. In Mainz, forces under the command of Count
Emicho of Leiningen found the Jews under the protection of the local
bishop, who had heard that they were coming and brought the Jews in
the area into his palace. Undeterred, these “Crusaders” stormed the bish-
op’s palace and massacred the Jews inside it.

An eleventh-century historian of the First Crusade, Albert of Aix,
recounted that they “killed the women, also, and with their swords
pierced tender children of whatever age and sex.”” A Crusader ex-
plained his thinking to a rabbi: “You are the children of those who
killed the object of our veneration, hanging him on a tree; and he him-
self had said: ‘There will yet come a day when my children will come
and avenge my blood.”

There is no record of Jesus Christ ever saying such a thing. The
Crusader massacres of Jews in Europe were not only an outrageous
crime but a disastrous miscalculation. Had the warriors of jihad suc-
ceeded in Europe, they would have subjugated the Christians and the

148 Tue History of Jiiap: From Muuammap ro ISIS

Jews in the same way. Had the Crusaders traversed Europe inviting
help from the Jews rather than killing them, the Crusaders might have
arrived in the Middle East far stronger, and the history of the world
would have been different in incalculable ways. But this was not by any
means the only time in the history of jihad warfare that the Muslims
benefited from disunity and infighting among those who stood be-
tween them and their goal.

The Muslims were disunited as well. The thirteenth-century Mus-
lim historian Ibn al-Athir even recorded speculation that the Crusaders
had come only at the bidding of the Fatimid Shi'ites, in order to disrupt
the growth of the Sunni Seljuk Turkish domains: “Some say that when
the masters of Egypt saw the expansion of the Seljuk empire, they took
fright and asked the Franj [Franks, or Crusaders] to march on Syria and
to establish a buffer between them and the Muslims. God alone knows
the truth.””

Crusader Barbarism

According to Ibn al-Athir, as the Crusaders approached Antioch, the
Muslim ruler of Antioch, Yaghi-Siyan, demonstrated for future histori-
ans that he knew exactly what the conflict was about, and it wasn’t about
land or treasure: he “feared possible sedition on the part of the Christians
of the city. He therefore decided to expel them.”

It was to no avail. Antioch fell to the Crusaders, who, lacking adequate
food supplies, proceeded to nearby Ma’arra to secure them. Ibn al-Athir
said that “for three days they put people to the sword, killing more than a
hundred thousand people and taking many prisoners.”’ This is impossible,
as Ma’arra likely was home to no more than ten thousand people, but ji-
had preachers were already finding the exaggeration of atrocity stories and
casualty figures to be a useful tool in recruitment efforts.

The Crusaders, meanwhile, were not finished in Ma’arra. Not find-
ing the stores of food they had hoped to find, and increasingly desper-
ate, they fell to cannibalism. The twelfth-century Frankish chronicler
Radulph of Caen recounted: “In Ma’arra our troops boiled pagan adults
in cooking-pots; they impaled children on spits and devoured them
grilled.""" A coterie of leading Crusaders reported less graphically to

CHAPTER FIVE 149

Pope Urban II: “A terrible famine racked the army in Ma’arra, and placed
it in the cruel necessity of feeding itself upon the bodies of the Sara-
cens.”!! Exclaimed Albert of Aix: “Not only did our troops not shrink
from eating dead Turks and Saracens; they also ate dogs!”””

This ghastly event spread far and wide in Muslim lands, contrib-
uting to the popular image of the Crusaders among Muslims that was
enunciated by the twelfth-century chronicler Usamah ibn Munqidh:
“All those who were well-informed about the Franj saw them as beasts
superior in courage and fighting ardour but in nothing else, just as ani-
mals are superior in strength and aggression.”

Even had the horrific events in Ma’arra never taken place, however,
it would have been difficult for the Crusaders to make a better impres-
sion: the characterization of non-Muslims as akin to animals was not
original to Usamah ibn Mungidh, but could be found in the Qur’an
itself: “lor the worst of beasts in the sight of Allah are those who reject
him; they will not believe.” (8:55)

The Crusaders in Jerusalem

In any case, the Crusaders scarcely behaved better as they continued
their conquests. After a five-week siege, the Crusaders entered Jerusalem
on July 15, 1099. An anonymous contemporary account by a Christian
recounted what happened next:

One of our knights, Letholdus by name, climbed on to the
wall of the city. When he reached the top, all the defenders
of the city quickly fled along the walls and through the city.
Our men followed and pursued them, killing and hacking, as
far as the temple of Solomon, and there was such a slaughter
that our men were up to their ankles in the enemy’s blood....

The emir who commanded the tower of David surren-
dered to the Count [of St. Gilles] and opened the gate where
pilgrims used to pay tribute. Entering the city, our pilgrims
pursued and killed the Saracens up to the temple of Solo-
mon. There the Saracens assembled and resisted fiercely all
day, so that the whole temple flowed with their blood. At last
the pagans were overcome and our men seized many men

150 Tue History or Jinap: From MunamMMAb To ISIS

and women in the temple, killing them or keeping them alive
as they saw fit. On the roof of the temple there was a great
crowd of pagans of both sexes, to whom Tancred and Gas-
ton de Beert gave their banners [to provide them with pro-
tection]. Then the crusaders scattered throughout the city,
seizing gold and silver, horses and mules, and houses full of
all sorts of goods. Afterwards our men went rejoicing and
weeping for joy to adore the sepulchre of our Saviour Jesus
and there discharged their debt to Him...”

Three principal Crusade leaders—Archbishop Daimbert; Godfrey,
Duke of Bouillon; and Raymond, Count of Toulouse—boasted to Pope
Paschal II in September 1099 about the Crusaders’ Jerusalem exploits:
“And if you desire to know what was done with the enemy who were
found there, know that in Solomon’s Porch and in his temple our men
rode in the blood of the Saracens up to the knees of their horses.”
Balderic, a bishop and the author of an early-twelfth-century history of
Jerusalem, reported that the Crusaders killed between twenty thousand
and thirty thousand people in the city."®

The story of this massacre has grown over the centuries. Around
1160, two Syrian chroniclers, al-Azimi and Ibn al-Qalanisi, wrote sep-
arately of the sack. Al-Azimi said only that the Crusaders “turned to
Jerusalem and conquered it from the hands of the Egyptians. Godfrey
took it. They burned the Church of the Jews.” Ibn al-Qalanisi added a
bit more detail: “The Franks stormed the town and gained possession of
it. A number of the townsfolk fled to the sanctuary and a great host were
killed. The Jews assembled in the synagogue, and the Franks burned it
over their heads. The sanctuary was surrendered to them on guarantee of
safety on 22 Sha’ban [14 July] of this year, and they destroyed the shrines
and the tomb of Abraham.”"”

Ibn al-Jawzi, writing about a hundred years after the event, said that
the Crusaders “killed more than 70,000 Muslims” in Jerusalem. Ibn al-
Athir recounted: “The population of the holy city was put to the sword,
and the I'ranj spent a week massacring Muslims. They killed more than
seventy thousand people in al-Aqsa mosque.”™ The fifteenth-century
historian Ibn ‘Taghribirdi recorded one hundred thousand, Former U.S.
President Bill Clinton claimed in November 2001 that the Crusaders

CHAPTER Five 151

murdered not just every Muslim warrior or even every Muslim male, but
“every woman and child who was Muslim on the Temple mound” until
the blood was running “up to their knees.”

The Crusaders’ cruelty was not unique for the savage warfare of
the period, but that does not excuse it. The cannibalism at Ma’arra has
largely been forgotten in the West, but the sack of Jerusalem and the
burning of the Jews inside their synagogue has not. The Crusaders’ sav-
agery in Jerusalem in 1099 was, according to journalist Amin Maalouf
in The Crusades Through Arab Eyes, the “starting point of a millennial
hostility between Islam and the West.””° Islamic scholar John Esposito
declares: “Five centuries of peaceful coexistence elapsed before political
events and an imperial-papal power play led to centuries-long series of
so-called holy wars that pitted Christendom against Islam and left an
enduring legacy of misunderstanding and distrust.””!

We have already seen how false these statements are. Islam, as the
jihads in Spain, France, Italy, and Asia Minor show, was hostile to the
West from its inception. There was no peaceful coexistence; there were
only brief periods in between jihad invasions. Christian overtures to es-
tablish a lasting peace accord were invariably answered by a repetition of
the triple choice: conversion, submission, or war. To ascribe a thousand
years of hostility between Islam and the West to the Crusaders is to
fall prey to the peculiar modern Western malady of civilizational self-
loathing and blaming the West for all the ills in the world.

Yet the Crusaders’ record is by no means spotless. No one’s is. Wars
never allow one side to claim all of the moral high ground. The sins
of the Crusaders, however, are taken today to be so very great, and the
Crusaders’ very mission so imperialistic, colonialist, and wrongheaded,
that those who view the period of the Crusades with unalloyed pride
are hard to find. This shame, however, is itself a relatively new devel-
opment; as recently as the middle of the twentieth century, schools all
over the U.S. called their sports teams Crusaders, and students were
aware that defense against the jihad was noble and worthwhile, even
if all those who participated in it weren’t. But that was when the West
was made of sterner stuff.

152 Tue History of Jinap: From MukkAmMMaD Yo ISIS

Crusader states

After the conquests of Antioch and Jerusalem, the poet Ibn al-Khayyat
lamented the devastation the Crusaders had wrought and exhorted
Muslims to respond:

The polytheists have swelled in a torrent of terrifying extent.
How long will this continue?

Armies like mountains, coming again and again, have ranged
forth from the lands of the Franks...

Do you not owe an obligation to God and Islam, defending
thereby young men and old?

Respond to God! Woe to you! Respond!”

Initially, the response was not overwhelming. The Crusaders met with
a good deal of success at first and established four states of their own in
quick succession: the County of Edessa and the Principality of Antioch
in 1098, the Kingdom of Jerusalem in 1099, and the County of Tripoli
in 1104. Collectively they were known in Europe as Outremer, the lands
beyond the sea.

The Crusaders’ original intention was not to establish states. Pope
Urban II decreed that lands recovered from the Muslims would belong
to Alexius Comnenus and the Byzantine Empire, not to the Western
Europeans who conquered them. He envisioned the First Crusade as an
act of Christian charity and sacrifice; hence the common parlance that a
warrior joining the Crusade was “taking up the cross.”

Some of the Crusaders saw their struggle in the same way. Godfrey
of Bouillon, the duke of Lower Lorraine, one of the more prominent
European lords who took up the cross, sold off many properties in order
to finance his trip, but he clearly planned to come home rather than settle
in the Holy Land, as he did not give up his title or all of his holdings.”

When the Crusade leaders met with Alexius Comnenus, he pre-
vailed upon them to agree individually, in accord with Urban’s wishes,
that any lands they conquered would revert to the Byzantine Empire.
But as the Crusaders’ siege of Antioch dragged on through the winter
and Muslim armies advanced north from Jerusalem, the Crusaders wait-
ed for the promised Byzantine troops to arrive. The emperor, however,

CHAPTER FIVE 153

received a report that the Crusaders’ situation in Antioch was hopeless
and turned back his forces. The Crusaders felt betrayed and reneged on
their earlier agreement to return the lands they won to Byzantine rule.

Although they existed in a state of more or less constant war, the
Crusader states managed to allow many of their citizens to go about
living normal lives. In the 1180s, a Muslim from al-Andalus, Ibn Jubayr,
visited the Crusader domains on his way to Mecca. To his dismay, he
found that Muslims were living better in the Crusader lands than they
were in the neighboring Islamic areas:

Upon leaving Tibnin [near Tyre], we passed through an
unbroken skein of farms and villages whose lands were ef-
ficiently cultivated. The inhabitants were all Muslims, but
they live in comfort with the Franj—may God preserve
them from temptation! Their dwellings belong to them and
all their property is unmolested. All the regions controlled
by the Franj in Syria are subject to this same system: the
landed domains, villages, and farms have remained in the
hands of the Muslims. Now, doubt invests the heart of a
great number of these men when they compare their lot to
that of their brothers living in Muslim territory, Indeed, the
Jatter suffer from the injustice of their coreligionists, where-
as the Franj act with equity.”

To preserve Muslims from this temptation, the jihad to destroy these
entities began immediately after they were established. The Principality
of Antioch fell to the warriors of jihad in 1268; the County of Tripoli, in
1289; and the Kingdom of Jerusalem, in 1291.

Zengi, Nur ed-Din, and the Second Crusade

The first Crusader state that was established, the County of Edessa, was
the first to go. The Turkish jihad leader Imad ad-Din Zengi, atabeg (gov-
ernor) of Mosul, laid siege to Edessa in 1144, and conquered it after a
four-month siege. The Syrian bishop Basil was present as the victors
plundered the Crusaders’ churches:

154 THe History oF Jinap: From MunaAmMan ‘ro ISIS

Everything was taken trom the Franj...gold, silver, holy vas-
es, chalices, patens, ornamented crucifixes, and great quan-
tities of jewels. The priests, nobles, and notables were taken
aside, stripped of their robes, and led away in chains to Alep-
po. Of the rest, the artisans were identified, and Zangi kept
them as prisoners, setting each to work at his craft. All the
other Franj, about a hundred men, were executed.”

The Crusader advance had been definitively halted, making Zengi a hero
of Islam. A contemporary inscription at Aleppo hailed him as the “tamer
of the infidels and the polytheists, leader of those who fight the Holy
War, helper of the armies, protector of the territory of the Muslims.”?’
Ibn al-Athir hailed Zengi in extravagant terms, attributing it all to the
intervention of Allah, as the Qur’an does regarding the Battle of Badr:

When Almighty God saw the princes of the Islamic lands
and the commanders of the Hanafite [monotheistic] creed
and how unable they were to support the one [true] religion
and their inability to defend those who believe in the One
God and He saw their subjugation by their enemy and the
severity of their despotism... He then wished to set over the
Franks someone who could requite the evil of their deeds
and to send to the devils of the crosses stones from Him to
destroy and annihilate them [the crosses]. He looked at the
roster of valiants among His helpers and of those possessed
of judgement, support and sagacity amongst His friends
and He did not see in it [the roster] anyone more capable of
that command, more solid as regards inclination, stronger

of purpose and more penetrating than the lord, the martyr
[al-shahid] Imad al-Din.*

Allah may have used Zengi for his own purposes, yet the atabeg was not
always a model of piety. One night not long after he conquered Edessa,
he drank a large quantity of wine and fell asleep, only to be awakened to
the sight of one of his Frankish slaves, Yarankash, sneaking some wine
from Zengi'’s own goblet. Enraged, Zengi vowed to punish the slave in
the morning, and fell asleep again—whereupon Yarankash, thoroughly

CHAPTER Five 155

frightened at the prospect of his master’s wrath, stabbed him multiple
times and fled.”

The death of Zengi did not blunt the renewed momentum of the
jihad. Pope Eugene III in December 1145 called for a second Crusade,
and an army was amassed, but it was soundly defeated by the Turks in
Asia Minor and never even got close to achieving its objective of re-
capturing Edessa. Zengi’s son Nur ed-Din worked hard to revive the
spirit of jihad among the Muslims, using a combination of threats and
enticements. One emir who received his call to aid him in jihad against
the Franks complained:

If I do not rush to Nur al-Din’s aid, he will strip me of
my domain, for he has already written to the devotees and
ascetics to request the aid of their prayers and to encourage
them to incite the Muslims to jzAad. At this very moment,
each of these men sits with his disciples and companions
reading Nur al-Din’s letters, weeping and cursing me. If ]
am to avoid anathema, I must accede to his request.*®

Unlike his father, Nur ed-Din was strict in his observance of Islam. Not
only did he not partake of alcohol, he forbade it to his troops as well,
along with, in the words of the chronicler Kamal al-Din, “the tambou-
rine, the flute, and other objects displeasing to God.” (In accord with
statements attributed to Muhammad, Islam forbids musical instruments
as well as alcohol.) The atabeg also “abandoned luxurious garments and
instead covered himself with rough cloth.”*’ Before battles, he would
pray, “O God, grant victory to Islam and not to Mahmud [his given
name; Nur ed-Din is a title meaning Light of the Religion]. Who is this
dog Mahmud to merit victory?”

Appealing to a rival Turkish commander amid ongoing disputes be-
tween rival Muslim factions, Nur ed-Din again demonstrated his piety:
“I desire no more than the well-being of the Muslims, jihad against the
infidels, and the release of the prisoners they are holding. If you come
over to my side with the army of Damascus, if we help cach other to
wage the jihad, my wish will be fulfilled.” It was. His forces captured
Damascus from Muslim rivals in 1154.

156 THe History or Jrtap: From MunaMMap ro TSIS

Jockeying for Egypt

The Crusaders, however, were by no means a spent force. At least not
yet. Realizing the feebleness of the Shi'ite Fatimid caliphate in Cairo,
King Amalric of the Kingdom of Jerusalem led troops into Egypt in
1164, where he faced the forces of Shirkuh, the general whom Nur
ed-Din had sent to seize the Fatimid domains for himself. Hoping to
relieve the pressure on Shirkuh, Nur ed-Din moved quickly toward
Antioch and defeated a large Crusader army in the outskirts of the
great city.

It was a standoff. Amalric agreed to withdraw from Egypt if
Shirkuh would as well, and so it was done. But the great game was
not over, In 1167, Nur ed-Din sent Shirkuh into Egypt again. By this
time, the Fatimid caliph was just a figurehead, like his Sunni Abbasid
counterpart; the real ruler of Egypt was Shawar, whom Nur ed-Din
had sent into Egypt only to see him turn against his patron. Shawar
appealed to Amalric for help; the Crusaders again entered Egypt,
and Shawar agreed to pay an annual tribute to the Christians for
protection against Nur ed-Din. However, this arrangement was not
to last either. When Shirkuh died in 1169, his nephew assumed his
authority, and defeated a combined force of Crusaders and Byzan-
tines at Damietta in Egypt. The Crusaders were driven from Egypt,
and Shirkuh’s nephew was only beginning to take the jihad to them
and to roll back what they had gained.

The Assassins

The Crusaders faced other foes as well. In 1175, the king of Germany
and Holy Roman emperor Frederick Barbarossa sent an envoy to Egypt
and Syria, who reported back to him about a strange and dangerous
Shi'ite Muslim sect, the Nizari Ismailis, commonly known as the Assas-
sins. With their planned murders of many of their individual opponents,
the Assassins gave the English language its word for one who commits
planned, premeditated murder, and foreshadowed the individual jihad
terror attacks of the twenty-first century. Barbarossa’s envoy wrote:

CHAPTER FIVE

Note that on the confines of Damascus, Antioch and Alep-
po there is a certain race of Saracens in the mountains, who
in their own vernacular are called Heyssessini, and in Roman
segnors de montana [elders of the mountains]. This breed of
men live without law, they eat swine’s flesh against the law
of the Saracens, and make use of all women without distinc-
tion, including their mothers and sisters. They live in the
mountains and are well-nigh impregnable, for they with-
draw into well-fortified castles. Their country is not very
fertile, so that they live on their cattle. They have among
them a Master, who strikes the greatest fear into all the Sar-
acen princes both far and near, as well as the neighboring
Christian lords. For he has the habit of killing them in an
astonishing way. The method by which this is done is as fol-
lows: this prince possesses in the mountains numerous and
most beautiful palaces, surrounded by very high walls, so
that none can enter except by a small and very well-guarded
door. In these palaces he has many of the sons of his peas-
ants brought up from early childhood. He has them taught
various languages, as Latin, Greek, Roman, Saracen as well
as many others. These young men are taught by their teach-
ers from their earliest youth to their full manhood, that they
must obey the lord of their land in all his words and com-
mands; and that if they do so, he, who has power over all
living gods, will give them the joys of paradise. ‘They are
also taught that they cannot be saved if they resist his will in
anything. Note that, from the time when they are taken in
as children, they see no one but their teachers and masters
and receive no other instruction until they are summoned
to the presence of the Prince to kill someone. When they
are in the presence of the Prince, he asks them if they are
willing to obey his commands, so that he may bestow para-
dise upon them. Whereupon, as they have been instructed,
and without any objection or doubt, they throw themselves
at his feet and reply with fervor, that they will obey him

157

158 Tur History oF Jinap: From MutamaMap To ISIS

in all things that he may command. Thereupon the Prince
gives each one of them a golden dagger and sends them out
to kill whichever prince he has marked down.**

Several years later, Archbishop William of Tyre wrote a history of the
Crusader states in which he included this:

There is in the province of Tyre, otherwise called Phoeni-
cia, and in the diocese of Tortosa, a people who possess ten
strong castles, with their dependent villages; their number,
according to what we have often heard, is about 60,000 or
more. It is their custom to install their master and choose
their chief, not by hereditary right, but solely by virtue of
merit. Disdaining any other title of dignity, they called
him the Elder. The bond of submission and obedience that
binds this people to their Chief is so strong, that there is no
task so arduous, difficult or dangerous that any one of them
would not undertake to perform it with the greatest zeal, as
soon as the Chief who has commanded it. If for example
there be a prince who is hated or mistrusted by this people,
the Chief gives a dagger to one or more of his followers. At
once whoever receives the command sets out on his mis-
sion, without considering the consequences of the deed nor
the possibility of escape. Zealous to complete the task, he
toils and labours as long as may be needful, until chance
gives him the opportunity to carry out his chief’s orders.
Both our people and the Saracens call them Assissini; we
do not know the origin of this name.

We do. The word “assassin” is derived from “Aashashin,” or hashish smok-
ers, a name given to the group by its foes and based on stories about
their novel method of recruiting new members. In the early thirteenth
century, the German chronicler Arnold of Liibeck revealed more about
the group’s mysterious leader:

I shall now relate things about this elder which appear ri-
diculous, but which are attested to me by the evidence of
reliable witnesses. This Old Man has by his witchcraft so

CHAPTER Five ; 159

bemused the men of his country, that they neither worship
nor believe in any God but himself. Likewise he entices
them in a strange manner with such hopes and with promis-
es of such pleasures with eternal enjoyment, that they prefer
rather to die than to live. Many of them even, when stand-
ing on a high wall, will jump off at his nod or command,
and, shattering their skulls, die a miserable death. The most
blessed, so he affirms, are those who shed the blood of men
and in revenge for such deeds themselves suffer death.
When therefore any of them have chosen to die in this way,
murdering someone by craft and then themselves dying so
blessedly in revenge for him, he himself hands them knives
which are, so to speak, consecrated by this affair, and then
intoxicates them with such a potion that they are plunged
into ecstasy and oblivion, displays to them by his magic cer-
tain fantastic dreams, full of pleasure and delights, or rather
of trumpery, and promises them eternal possession of these
things in reward for such deeds. .

The fullest account of how the Assassins recruited their fanatical killers
comes from Marco Polo’s late-thirteenth-century Travels:

Mulehet is a country in which the Old Man of the Moun-
tain dwelt in former days; and the name means “Place of the
Aram.” | will tell you his whole history as related by Messer
Marco Polo, who heard it from several natives of that region.

The Old Man was called in their language Aloadin. He
had caused a certain valley between two mountains to be
enclosed, and had turned it into a garden, the largest and
most beautiful that ever was seen, filled with every variety
of fruit. In it were erected pavilions and palaces the most
elegant that can be imagined, all covered with gilding and
exquisite painting. And there were runnels too, flowing freely
with wine and milk and honey and water; and numbers of
ladies and of the most beautiful damsels in the world, who
could play on all manner of instruments, and sung most
sweetly, and danced in a manner that it was charming to be-

160 Tre History or Jinan: From Munammapd to ISIS

hold. For the Old Man desired to make his people believe
that this was actually Paradise. So he had fashioned it after
the description that Mahommet gave of his Paradise, to wit,
that it should be a beautiful garden running with conduits of
wine and milk and honey and water, and full of lovely wom-
en for the delectation of all its inmates. And sure enough
the Saracens of those parts believed that it was Paradise!

Now no man was allowed to enter the Garden save
those whom he intended to be his Ashishin. There was a
Fortress at the entrance to the Garden, strong enough to
resist all the world, and there was no other way to get in.
He kept at his Court a number of the youths of the country,
from 12 to 20 years of age, such as had a taste for soldier-
ing, and to these he used to tell tales about Paradise, just
as Mahommet had been wont to do, and they believed in
him just as the Saracens believe in Mahommet. Then he
would introduce them into his garden, some four, or six, or
ten at a time, having first made them drink a certain potion
which cast them into a deep sleep, and then causing them
to be lifted and carried in. So when they awoke, they found
themselves in the Garden.°?

According to the legend that surrounded the Assassins, the “potion” that
made these young men susceptible to the suggestion that they had visit-
ed Paradise was hashish.** The Old Man would get his potential recruits
high on hashish—an experience they didn’t understand and for which
they had no cultural referent—and then introduce them to his gardens
which, as Marco Polo related, had been scrupulously designed to corre-
spond to the Qur’an’s descriptions of Paradise: fruits, women, and all:

?

Indeed, you [disbelievers] will be tasters of the painful pun-
ishment,

And you will not be recompensed except for what you used
to do—

But not the chosen servants of Allah.

Those will have a provision determined—

CHAPTER Five 161

Fruits; and they will be honored

In gardens of pleasure

On thrones facing one another.

There will be circulated among them a cup from a flowing
spring,

White and delicious to the drinkers;

No bad effect is there in it, nor from it will they be intox-
icated.

And with them will be women limiting their glances, with
large eyes,

As if they were eggs, well-protected. (37:38-49)

The Old Man of the Mountain, according to Marco Polo's account, used
his young recruits’ experience of Paradise to manipulate them into doing
his murderous bidding:

When therefore they awoke, and found themselves in a
place so charming, they deemed that it was Paradise in very
truth. And the ladies and damsels dallied with them to their
hearts’ content, so that they had what young men would
have; and with their own good will they never would have

quitted the place.

But eventually the hashish wore off, and the girls were gone, and the
Old Man of the Mountain would then explain to the bewildered and
disappointed young men who had been so enjoying Paradise what had
just happened:

Now this Prince whom we call the Old One kept his Court
in grand and noble style, and made those simple hill-folks
about him believe firmly that he was a great Prophet. And
when he wanted one of his Ashishin to send on any mission,
he would cause that potion whereof I spoke to be given to
one of the youths in the garden, and then had him carried
into his Palace. So when the young man awoke, he found
himself in the Castle, and no longer in that Paradise; whereat
he was not over well pleased. He was then conducted to the

162 THe History oF JiHaAp: From MunamMan to ISIS

Old Man's presence, and bowed before him with great ven-
eration as believing himself to be in the presence of a true
Prophet. The Prince would then ask whence he came, and he
would reply that he came from Paradise! and that it was ex-
actly such as Mahommet had described it in the Law. This of
course gave the others who stood by, and who had not been
admitted, the greatest desire to enter therein.””

This was all to induce the young men to commit murder:

So when the Old Man would have any Prince slain, he
would say to such a youth: “Go thou and slay So and So;
and when thou returnest my Angels shall bear thee into
Paradise. And shouldst thou die, natheless even so will [
send my Angels to carry thee back into Paradise.” So he
caused them to believe; and thus there was no order of his
that they would not affront any peril to execute, for the
great desire they had to get back into that Paradise of his.
And in this manner the Old One got his people to murder
any one whom he desired to get rid of. Thus, too, the great
dread that he inspired all Princes withal, made them be-
come his tributaries in order that he might abide at peace
and amity with them,”

The Old Man could plausibly promise these young men that if they
killed at his bidding and were killed in the process, they would enter
Paradise, because that same promise is in the Qur’an: “Indeed, Allah
has purchased from the believers their lives and their properties; for
that they will have Paradise. They fight in the cause of Allah, so they
kill and are killed.” (9:111)

Although they mainly killed rival Muslim leaders, Assassins mur-
dered the Latin king of Jerusalem, Conrad of Montferrat, in 1192. They
became in the consciousness of the Crusaders the epitome of the ruth-
less and terrible fanatics against whom they were fighting. Twenty-first-
century individual jihadis have frequently boasted, “We love death more
than you love life.” The Assassins would have agreed.

CHAPTER Five 163

Saladin

Meanwhile, a jihad commander was on the scene who would turn the
tide in the Holy Land decisively against the Crusaders. Shirkuh’s ambi-
tious young nephew was named Saladin. Once in control in Egypt, he
began enforcing the laws subjugating Christians as dhimmis: Michael the
Syrian recounted that Saladin “issued an order in Egypt that Christians
must always appear in public wearing a [distinguishing] belt as a sign of
servitude, and that they could not mount a horse or mule.”*!

Saladin was to become one of the most celebrated and renowned
Muslim warriors in the entire history of jihad, and one of the few whose
name is known in the West.

In modern-day mythmaking, Saladin is to individual Muslims what
al-Andalus is to Muslim polities. He has become the prototype of the
tolerant, magnanimous Muslim warrior, historical proof of the nobility of
Islam. In The Crusades Through Arab Eyes, Amin Maalouf describes Sala-
din as “always affable with visitors, insisting that they stay to eat, treating
them with full honours, even if they were infidels, and satisfying all their
requests. He could not bear to let someone who had come to him depart
disappointed, and there were those who did not hesitate to take advantage
of this quality. One day, during a truce with the Franj, the ‘Brins,’ lord of
Antioch, arrived unexpectedly at Saladin’s tent and asked him to return a
district that the sultan had taken four years earlier. And he agreed!”

But he was not always so magnanimous. Saladin set out to conquer
Jerusalem in 1187 in response to Crusaders under the command of Rey-
nald of Chatillon’s taking a page from the Islamic prophet Muhammad's
book and raiding caravans—in this case, Muslim caravans. The rulers of
the Kingdom of Jerusalem ordered Reynald to stop, because they knew
that his actions endangered the very survival of their kingdom. Yet he
persisted, and finally Saladin had had enough.”

He struck hard. When Saladin’s forces defeated the Crusaders at
Hattin on July 4, 1187, he ordered the mass execution of his Christian
opponents. According to his secretary, Imad ed-Din, Saladin “ordered
that they should be beheaded, choosing to have them dead rather than
in prison. With him was a whole band of scholars and Sufis and a certain
number of devout men and ascetics; each begged to be allowed to kill
one of them, and drew his sword and rolled back his sleeve.” The great

164 Tur History or Jinap: From MuvttiamMaAD TO ISIS

jihad warrior took particular satisfaction in the scene: “Saladin, his face
joyful, was sitting on his dais; the unbelievers showed black despair.”™
The warriors of jihad captured the True Cross and displayed it in Da-
mascus, upside down.”

However, when Saladin recaptured Jerusalem for the Muslims in
October 1187, he treated the Christians with magnanimity—in sharp
contrast to the behavior of the Crusaders in 1099. Yet magnanimity was
not his initial plan; he had originally intended to put to death all the
Christians in the city. However, the Christian commander inside Jerusa-
lem, Balian of Ibelin, threatened in turn to destroy the city and kill all the
Muslims there before Saladin could get inside, so Saladin relented—but
once inside the city, he did enslave many of the Christians who could
not afford to buy their way out.” Each Christian had to raise a ransom
payment in order to leave the city; those who remained who were not
enslaved had to pay the sizya.””

Saladin also took Acre and Jaffa, greatly reducing the Crusaders’
territory. The tide had turned definitively against the Crusaders, and the
end of their presence in the Middle East was only a matter of time.
Alarmed by Saladin’s victories, Pope Gregory VIII called the Third Cru-
sade, and won the active participation of King Henry II of England and
Philip If of France, who had previously been warring against each other.

But what began in a demonstration of Christian unity was doomed
by Christian disunity: also participating was Frederick Barbarossa, by
now seventy years old. His title of Holy Roman emperor, which all the
successors of Charlemagne in Germany had taken, may have played well
at home, but in the East it was a different story: the Byzantine emperors
still considered themselves to be the sole rightful emperors of the Ro-
mans. The Roman emperor Isaac I] thus viewed the Roman emperor
Frederick Barbarossa as an upstart and a pretender. Isaac granted F'red-
erick permission to pass with his Crusader forces through Byzantine
domains, but once Frederick was there, Isaac did all he could to make
his passage difficult. So offended was Isaac, emperor of the Romans, by
the appropriation of his title that he contacted Saladin himself and con-
cluded a secret treaty with the Muslim commander; Isaac agreed to do
everything he could to hinder Frederick's advance.*®

CuapTer Five 165

As promised, provisions failed to appear, and Byzantine troops ac-
tively interfered with the Crusaders’ advance. Frederick became infuri-
ated and warned Isaac that if the harassment didn't stop, the Crusaders
would attack Byzantine territory. Isaac asked for negotiations, but these
became mired in arguments over who exactly was the Roman emperor,
and so Frederick ultimately made good on his threat and captured Adri-
anople. Isaac then agreed that if the Crusaders withdrew from his city,
he would provide them provisions and other aid against the Muslims.”

Frederick was then able to advance across Asia Minor, defeating the
Turks in one battle before it all came to naught when the elderly Holy
Roman emperor drowned while crossing a river in Armenia. His Cru-
sade came to nothing. The other forces of the Third Crusade managed
to recapture Acre and Jaffa, but they failed to retake Jerusalem.

Saladin, meanwhile, had visions of extending his jihad far beyond the
Holy Land. He understood his fight against the Crusaders as part of the
larger jihad that was indeed global, and he wanted to pursue that as well.
His friend Baha ed-Din recalled that once, standing on the shores of the
Mediterranean with Saladin, the great commander had said to him: “I
think that when God grants me victory over the rest of Palestine I shall
divide my territories, make a will stating my wishes, then set sail on this sea
for their far-off lands and pursue the Franks there, so as to free the earth of

anyone who does not believe in God, or die in the attempt.”

The Fifth Crusade

Saladin did not live to realize his aspiration to take the jihad to the lands
of the Franks; he died in Damascus in 1193. Other Muslims, however,
had the same goal and would pursue it indefatigably. In April 1213, nine
years after the Fourth Crusade went disastrously awry, with the Crusad-
ers getting involved in a Byzantine dynastic dispute and ending up sack-
ing Constantinople, Pope Innocent III called a Fifth Crusade. In his bull
Quia Maior, he articulated the reasons for the conflict as he saw them,
in the virtual obverse of Saladin’s aspirations for global jihad. Innocent
noted that “the Christian peoples, in fact, held almost all the Saracen
provinces up to the time of Blessed Gregory”—that is, Pope Gregory

166 Tue History of Jinan: From MutammMmand To ISIS

the Great, who reigned from 590 to 604.°! “But since then,” Innocent
continued, “a son of perdition has arisen, the false prophet Muhammad,
who has seduced many men from the truth by worldly enticements and
the pleasures of the flesh.”*

He thought that the end of Islam was approaching: “Although
{[Muhammad’s] treachery has prevailed up to the present day, we nev-
ertheless put our trust in the Lord who has already given us a sign
that good is to come, that the end of this beast is approaching, whose
‘number’, according to the Revelation of St. John, will end in 666 years,
of which already nearly 600 have passed.” Nonetheless, it was imper-
ative to resist the Saracens: “And in addition to the former great and
grave injuries which the treacherous Saracens have inflicted on our
Redeemer, on account of our offences, the same perfidious Saracens
have recently built a fortified stronghold to confound the Christian
name on Mount Thabor, where Christ revealed to his disciples a vision
of his future glory; by means of this fortress they think they will easily
occupy the city of Acre, which is very near them, and then invade the
rest of that land without any obstructive resistance, since it is almost
entirely devoid of forces or supplies.”*?

This Crusade, too, was ultimately unsuccessful, as were subsequent
forays. The warriors of jihad from the Mamluk sultanate took Jerusalem
in 1244. The remaining Crusader kingdoms were in serious peril, and
there was no help in sight. The jihadis pursued their quarry ruthlessly: in
1268, when the jihad forces of the Mamluk sultan Baybars took Antioch
from the Crusaders, Baybars was annoyed to find that the Crusader rul-
er, Count Bohemond VI, had already left the city. So he wrote to Bohe-
mond to make sure he knew what his men had done in Antioch:

You would have seen your knights prostrate beneath the
horses’ hooves, your houses stormed by pillagers and ran-
sacked by looters, your wealth weighed by the quintal,
your women sold four at a time and bought for a dinar of
your own money! You would have seen the crosses in your
churches smashed, the pages of the false Testaments scat-
tered, the Patriarchs’ tombs overturned. You would have
seen your Muslim enemy trampling on the place where you
celebrate the Mass, cutting the throats of monks, priests

CHAPTER Five 167

and deacons upon the altars, bringing sudden death to the
Patriarchs and slavery to the royal princes. You would have
seen fire running through your palaces, your dead burned
in this world before going down to the fires of the next,
your palace lying unrecognizable, the Church of St. Paul
and that of the Cathedral of St. Peter pulled down and de-
stroyed; then you would have said, “Would that I were dust,
and that no letter had ever brought me such tidings!”

As the last cities of Outremer were facing conquest and Islamization in
1290, an offer of help came from Arghun, the Mongol ruler of Persia and
client of the great Mongol emperor Kublai Khan.

In 1258, Hulagu Khan, the brother of Kublai Khan and grandson
of Genghis Khan, sacked Baghdad and toppled the Abbasid caliphate.
(The Mamluks restored the Abbasids in Cairo in 1261, but the Abbasid
caliphate in Egypt was never much more than a figurehead and a pawn
of vying Islamic factions.**) Flulagu’s mother was a Nestorian Christian,
and Hulagu himself maintained a positive stance toward Christianity.
Two years later, a Christian Mongol leader named Kitbuka seized Da-
mascus and Aleppo for the Mongols. Arghun, a Buddhist, wanted to
try to raise interest among the Christian kings of Europe in making
common cause to wrest the Holy Land from the Muslims once and for
all. Arghun’s closest friend was the Catholicos, the chief prelate of the
Nestorian Church. His vizier was a Jew. Arghun had come to power in
Persia by toppling the Muslim ruler Ahmed (a convert from Nestorian
Christianity) after Ahmed made attempts to join forces with the Mam-
Juks in Cairo.*°

Arghun had written to Pope Honorius IV in 1285 to suggest an
alliance between the Mongols and the Christians of Europe against the
Seljuk Turks and the Mamluks of Egypt, but the pope did not answer.*’
The Mongol ruler then sent an emissary, Rabban Sauma, a Nestorian
Christian from Central Asia, to Europe to discuss the matter personally
with the pope and the Christian kings.

Sauma’s journey was onc of the most remarkable in the ancient world:
he started out from Trebizond and traveled all the way to Bordeaux to
meet with King Edward I of England. Along the way, he met the Byz-
antine emperor Andronicus in Constantinople (whom he referred to

168 Tie History oF Jinap: From MuttamMMap To ISIS

as King Basileus, or King King, demonstrating that thirteenth-century
translators weren't infallible); traveled to Naples, Rome (where Honorius
IV had just died and a new pope had not yet been chosen), and Genoa;
went on to Paris, where he dined with King Philip IV of France; met
with Edward I in Bordeaux; and returned to Rome for a triumphant
mecting with the new pope, Nicholas IV.%*

All the European leaders liked Rabban Sauma’s proposal of a Mon-
gol—Christian alliance to free the Holy Land. Philip IV offered to march
to Jerusalem himself at the head of a Crusader army. Edward I was like-
wise enthusiastic: Sauma was proposing an alliance that the king himself
had called for in the past. Pope Nicholas showered Sauma and Arghun
with gifts. But what none of these men, or anyone else in Europe, could
decide was a date for this grand new Crusade. Their enthusiasm re-
mained vague; their promises, nonspecific.

The crowned heads of Europe were too disunited and distracted
with challenges at home to take up the Mongols’ offer; perhaps they
were also suspicious of a non-Christian king who wanted to wage war
to liberate the Christian Holy Land. They may have feared that once
they helped the wolf devour the Muslims, the wolf would turn on them
in turn. But in any case, it was an opportunity missed. Dissatisfied with
the results of Rabban Sauma’s journey, Arghun sent another emissary,
Buscarel of Gisolf, to Europe in 1289.

He asked Philip IV and Edward I for help, offering to take Jerusa-
lem jointly with soldiers sent by the Christian kings; he would then hand
the city over to the Crusaders. Edward’s answer, which is the only one
that survives, was polite but noncommittal. Dismayed, Arghun tried yet
again in 1291, but it was too late: in that year, Outremer fell. By the time
the emissaries returned, Arghun himself was dead.*!

An alliance with the Mongols was a Jost opportunity for the Chris-
tian Europeans. In the early fourteenth century, the renowned Islamic
jurist [bn Taymiyya composed a fatwa, that is, a religious ruling on a dis-
puted issue, against the Muslims of Mardin, who had been conquered
by the Mongols in 1260, for not waging jihad against their new over-
lords. Ibn Taymiyya fulminated against the people of Mardin, saying
that “in spite of their pretension to be Muslims—[they] not only glorify
Chinghis-Khan but they also fight the Muslims. The worst of these

Cuaptere Five 169

infidels even give him their total and complete obedience; they bring
him their properties and give their decisions in his name.... Above all
this they fight the Muslims and treat them with the greatest enmity.
They ask the Muslims to obey them, to give them their properties, and
to enter [into the obedience of the rules] which were imposed on them
by this infidel polytheistic King...”

But by that time, there was no Christian presence anywhere in the
area that could conceivably have allied with the Mongols to fight against
the warriors of jihad. The fourteenth-century Muslim historian Abu’l
Fida rejoiced over the end of the Crusader presence in the Holy Land:
“With these conquests the whole of Palestine was now in Muslim hands,
a result that no one would have dared to hope for or desire. Thus the
whole of Syria and the coastal zones were purified of the Franks, who
had once been on the point of conquering Egypt and subduing Damas-
cus and other cities. Praise be to God!”®°

Indeed, there were many times when the Crusaders seemed on the
verge of an immense victory, only to have it snatched from them. Nev-
ertheless, neither Abu’l Fida nor anyone else at the time seemed to have
noticed the greatest achievement of the Crusades: from the time Pope
Urban II called the First Crusade in 1095 to the fall of the last of Out-
remer in 1291, there were no jihad forays into Europe. The Reconquista
in Spain continued to reduce the size of Islamic al-Andalus, and so in
sharp contrast to the jihad forays into Europe and against the Byzantine
Empire that had been a regular feature in the centuries before the Cru-
sades, the two centuries of the principal Crusader period saw the forces
of jihad both in Spain and in the Holy Land in an unfamiliar posture:
on the defensive.

This did not, of course, make any difference to the Christians and
Jews who had the misfortune of living within Islamic domains. The influ-
ential Islamic jurist Ibn Qayyim a!-Jawziyya, who died in 1350, reiterated
the restrictions on the dhimmis from the Abbasid capital of Damascus:

Those who are of the opinion that to pray in a church or
synagogue is loathsome also say that they are places of
great infidelity and polytheism. Indeed, their loathsome-
ness is greater than that of bathhouses, cemeteries or dung-
hills since they are places of Divine Wrath.... Moreover,

170 THe History or Juuav: From MuynammMabd To ISIS

are they not the houses of the enemies of Allah, and Al-
lah is not to be adored in the houses of his enemies...?
They [the Christians] are prohibited to sound bells
except noiselessly in the depths of their churches, ..for the
sound of bells is the banner of infidelity, as well as its out-
ward sign.... Verily, Allah has annulled the sounding of the
Christian bell and the Jewish [ram’s] horn and has replaced
them with the call of monotheism and devotion. He has
raised the sound of the word Js/am as a sign of the true voca-
tion so as to throw into obscurity the call of the infidel, and he
has replaced the bell with the [Muslim] call to prayer. ..just
as He has replaced the Satanic scriptures with the Koran....
“Humiliation and derision are to be the lot of those that
disobey my word.” The dhimmis are the most disobedient
of His command and contrary to His word; consequent-
ly, it befits them to be humiliated by distinguishing them
from the comportment of the Muslims whom Allah has
exalted through their obedience to Him and His Prophet
above those that have disobeyed Him.... That a distinc-
tive sign [ghiyar] must be imposed upon them is clear from
the Prophet’s statement, “He of the people who resembles
them [the dsimmts| shall be deemed of their number.” ...
Moreover the distinctive dress serves other purposes. He
[the Muslim] will thereby know that he is not to go to meet
him, he is not to seat him among Muslim company, he is
not to kiss his hand, he is not to stand up for him, he is
not to address him with the terms brother or master, he is
not to wish him success or honor as is customary toward a
Muslim, he is not to give him Muslim charity, he is not to
call him as a witness, either for accusation or defence...%

The jihad to impose these and other humiliations upon Christians and
Jews in Europe was soon to resume and make immense gains. Howev-
er, if the Crusades had never been attempted at all, it is quite possible
that the warriors of jihad would have overrun all of Europe, and the
subsequent history of the world would have taken a drastically different
course. Instead, Europe experienced the High Middle Ages, the Refor-

CHAPTER Five 171

mation, and the Enlightenment, and the foundations of modern society
were laid. It would not be until the twenty-first century that the free
societies created out of this intellectual ferment would again be seriously
imperiled by the forces of jihad.

Il. THE RECONQUISTA GAINS
GROUND

The Almohads

In the early twelfth century, a Berber Muslim scholar named Abu Ab-
dallah Muhammad ibn Tumart began to preach that the ruling Almora-
vids had strayed from the pure religion of Muhammad, and that the
Muslims in its domains needed to return to full implementation of the
teachings of the Qur’an and Sunnah. His message found a ready audi-
ence among Muslims who had imbibed the Qur’anic notion that Allah
bestowed or withheld his blessings to a society in direct correlation to
how obedient it was to his commands. In 1121, his followers proclaimed
him the Mahdi, the savior figure who was to return before Judgment
Day in order to prepare and purify the believers. His followers, according
to a contemporary chronicler, “swore that they would fight for him and
dedicate their lives to his service.”®

Ibn Tumart died around 1130, but the movement he began lived on.
The rigorists, who called themselves Almohads (monotheists), rapidly
gained ground, and in 1147 were able to overthrow the Almoravids in
North Africa; the Almohad leader, Abd al-Mu’min al-Gumi, declared
himself caliph. Over the next twenty-five years, the Almohads gained
control over all the remaining Muslim domains of al-Andalus.

Life was not pleasant for non-Muslims in Almohad Spain. The
Muslirn historian Ibn Baydhaq detailed how the Almohads treated the
Jews as they advanced:

Abd al-Mumin...the leader of the Almohads after the
death of Muhammad ibn Tumart the Mahdi...captured
Tlemcen {in the Maghreb] and killed all those who were in

L/Z THE HiIstTORY OF JIHAD: FROM MOHAMMAD TO Loto

it, including the Jews, except those who embraced Islam....
[In Sijilmasa] one hundred and fifty persons were killed for
clinging to their [Jewish] faith.... All the cities in the Al-
moravid state were conquered by the Almohads. One hun-
dred thousand persons were killed in Fez on that occasion,
and 120,000 in Marrakesh. The Jews in all [Maghreb] lo-
calities [conquered]...groaned under the heavy yoke of the
Almohads; many had been killed, many others converted;
none were able to appear in public as Jews.

The renowned Jewish philosopher Moses ben Maimon, Maimonides,
was born in Cérdoba but fled the supposedly tolerant and pluralistic
Muslim Spain in the 1160s. He later remarked:

You know, my brethren, that on account of our sins God has
cast us into the midst of this people, the nation of Ishmael,
who persecute us severely, and who devise ways to harm us
and to debase us.... No nation has ever done more harm to
Israel. None has matched it in debasing and humiliating us.
None has been able to reduce us as they have.... We have
borne their imposed degradation, their lies, and absurdities,
which are beyond human power to bear. We have become as
in the words of the psalmist, “But I am as a deaf man, I hear
not, and I am as a dumb man that opens not his mouth”
(Ps. 38:14). We have done as our sages of blessed memory
have instructed us, bearing the lies and absurdities of Ish-
mael, We listen but remain silent.... In spite of all this, we
are not spared from the ferocity of their wickedness and
their outbursts at any time. On the contrary, the more we
suffer and choose to conciliate them, the more they choose
to act belligerently toward us. Thus David has depicted our

plight: “I am at peace, but when I speak, they are for war!”
(Ps; 12027).

The Almohads meant to revive the spirit of jihad among the Muslims
of Spain and expand those domains. Driven by a revivalist fervor rival-
ing that of the jihadis of earlier centuries, the Almohads won a series

Cuapter Five 173

of victories over the Christians, capturing Alcacer do Sal, the gateway
to Lisbon, in 1191. Four years later, they declared a new jihad against
the Christians of Spain and decisively defeated King Alfonso VIII of
Castile in 1195—the most disastrous defeat the Christians of Spain
had suffered since the debacle at Sagrajas 109 years before. In 1197,
they besieged Madrid.

In line with their rigorist origins, the Almohads made sure to enforce
the humiliation of the dsimsts in their domains. The thirteenth-century
Muslim historian al-Marrakushi noted that in 1198, Abu Yusuf, the Al-
mohad ruler in Spain,

ordered the Jewish inhabitants of the Maghreb to make
themselves conspicuous among the rest of the population
by assuming a special attire consisting of dark blue gar-
ments, the sleeves of which were so wide as to reach to their
feet and—instead of a turban—to hang over their ears a cap
whose form was so 1]]-conceived as to be easily mistaken for
a pack-saddle. This apparel became the costume of all the
Jews of the Maghreb and remained obligatory until the end
of the prince's reign and the beginning of that of his son
Abu Abd Allah [Abu Muhammad Abd Allah al-Adil, the
Just, 1224-1227].

Abu Abd Allah, however, was not offering actual justice or equitable
treatment:

The latter made a concession only after appeals of all kinds
had been made by the Jews, who had entreated all those
whom they thought might be helpful to intercede on their
behalf. Abu Abd Allah obliged them to wear yellow gar-
ments and turbans, the very costume they still wear in the
present year 621 [1224]. Abu Yusuf’s misgivings as to the
sincerity of their conversion to Islam prompted him to take
this measure and impose upon them a specific dress. “If I
were sure,” said he, “that they really had become Muslims,
I would let them assimilate through marriage and other
means; on the other hand, had I evidence that they had re-

174 Tine History of Jinapv: From Mun AMMAD TO ISIS

mained infidels I would have them massacred, reduce their
children to slavery and confiscate their belongings for the
benefit of the believers.”°

Meanwhile, with Saladin’s defeat of the Crusaders at Hattin and Je-
rusalem in 1187, just a few years before these reversals in Spain, the
Christian losses in the Holy Land and in Spain made it appear as if
Christendom was beset by an implacable foe with a global reach. And,
indeed it was. In February 1210, Pope Innocent III wrote to Archbishop
Rodrigo of Toledo, urging the Christians of Spain not to make the same
mistakes that had led to so many defeats at the hands of the Muslims in
the Holy Land—chiefly disunity and impiety.” His warning appeared
all the more urgent the following year, when the Almohads under the
leadership of their caliph, Muhammad al-Nasir, invaded Spain with a
huge army of jihadis and began advancing again. Innocent, aware of the
urgency of the situation, sent new letters calling for unity and renewed
religious fervor to other Christian leaders, both spiritual and temporal,
culminating in letters in 1212 to the bishops of France, informing them
of the gravity of the jihad threat and calling for spiritual and material
aid for Alfonso and the other Christian rulers who were preparing to
confront the Almohads.”

Innocent also wrote to Alfonso, urging him to humble himself be-
fore the Lord, and not to try to engage the Almohads if he was not
confident of victory, but to seek a truce if necessary.”” Then he called for
a general fast among the people of Rome and a procession in the city to
pray for the peace of the Church and the favor of God in the battle with
the Muslims in Spain.”

On July 16, 1212, the Christians won a massive victory over the Al-
mohads at Las Navas de Tolosa in the southern Spanish province of Jaén.
The caliph Muhammad, in imminent danger of being captured, fled in
a panic, leaving behind his standard, which the Christians recovered and
sent to the house of a religious order near Burgos, where it remains to
this day. King Alfonso VIII wrote happily to Pope Innocent III:

In order to show how immense were the numbers of the en-
emy, when our army rested after the battle for two days in
the enemy camp, for all the fires which were needed to cook

CHAPTER Five 175

food and make bread and other things, no other wood was
needed than that of the enemy arrows and spears which were
lying about, and even then we burned scarcely half of them.”

Innocent received the news as an answer to his prayers. The power of the
jthad in Spain was definitively broken, not to be revived until centuries
later. From 1212 on, the Christians in Spain made steady gains. Not
only the jihad that the Almohads had called in 1195, but the jihad that
began when Tarig ibn Ziyad burned his boats and declared to his men
that they were going to conquer or die, was now a spent force, although
it would still be nearly three hundred years before Islamic rule in Spain
ended completely.

In 1236, the Christians captured Cérdoba; in 1243, they took Va-
lencia; and in 1248, Seville. By 1249, the emirate of Granada was all
that was left of Islamic al-Andalus. In 1280, however, the Muslims of
Granada defeated an invading Christian force, and the Reconquista was
stymied for a time. By that point, however, the Muslims of Spain were
directing their energies solely to holding on to the territories they had,
not to winning more.

Elsewhere, however, the jihad met with greater success.

II. THE JIHAD RESUMES IN INDIA

If Innocent III had been aware of the larger global picture and had
a comprehensive understanding of how not just Christians but all
non-Muslim states and individuals are threatened by the jihad impera-
tive, he might have been just as alarmed by the news out of India as he
was by the tidings from the Holy Land and Spain. For just as Saladin
was reviving the fortunes of the jihad in the Holy Land, another Mus-
lim commander, Mu’izz ad-Din Muhammad Ghori, was reviving the
jihad in India.

In 1191 and 1192, Muhammad Ghori twice defeated a force of
Rajputs led by the Hindu commander Prithviraj Chauhan in northern
India. The thirteenth-century Muslim historian Hasan Nizami revealed
his contempt for the Hindus as he noted that a primary objective of the
jihad remained the destruction of Hindu “idolatry”:

176 THe History or JiHAD: FROM MuHAMMAD TO lols

The victorious army on the right and on the left departed
towards Ajmer.... When the crow-faced Hindus began to
sound their white shells on the backs of the elephants, you
would have said that a river of pitch was flowing impetu-
ously down the face of a mountain of blue.... The army of
Islam was completely victorious, and a hundred thousand
groveling Hindus swiftly departed to the fire of hell.... He
destroyed [at Ajmer] the pillars and foundations of the idol
temples, and built in their stead mosques and colleges, and
the precepts of Islam, and the customs of the law were di-
vulged and established.””

At Aligarh, the Muslims put down a Hindu uprising and, said Hasan
Nizami, raised “three bastions as high as heaven with their heads, and
their carcasses became food for beasts of prey.” As was so often the case in
jihad warfare, brutality mixed with piety: “The tract was freed from idols
and idol-worship and the foundations of infidelism were destroyed.””

The following year, Muhammad Ghori defeated the Indian king
Jayachandra of Kanauj and plundered the Hindu treasures at Asni and
Varanasi. The contemporary Muslim historian Ibn Asir recounted: “The
slaughter of Hindus [at Varanasi] was immense; none were spared except
women and children, and the carnage of men went on until the earth
"7? ‘The women and children were, of course, enslaved. The
warriors of jihad then set out to seal the triumph of Islam: according
to Hasan Nizami, “In Benares, which is the centre of the country of
Hind, they destroyed one thousand temples and raised mosques on their
foundations.””* After a victory by the jihad commander Muhammad
bin Bakhtiyar Khilji in another place, according to a thirteenth-century
Muslim historian, “great plunder fell into the hands of the victors. Most
of the inhabitants were Brahmins with shaven heads. They were put to
death. Large numbers of books were found...but no one could explain
their contents as all the men had been killed.”””

At Delhi, the Muslims destroyed twenty-seven Hindu temples and
built a grand mosque. They were under the command of Qutbuddin
Aibak, a slave soldier who succeeded Muhammad Ghori and founded
the Mamluk sultanate. Nizami recounts that the Muslims decorated the
new mosque “with the stones and gold obtained from the temples which

was weary.

CHAPTER FIveE 177

had been demolished by elephants.”*° In 1196, Aibak and his jihadis
attacked Anahilwar Patan, the capital of Gujarat. According to Nizami,
“Fifty thousand infidels were dispatched to hell by the sword” and “more
than twenty thousand slaves, and cattle beyond all calculation fell into
the hands of the victors.”*’ After Aibak’s conquest of Kalinjar in 1202,
said Nizami, “the temples were converted into mosques... Fifty thou-
sand men came under the collar of slavery and the plain became black as
pitch with Hindus.”®

Nizami summarized Muhammad Ghori’s reign as a triumph for
Islam: “He purged by his sword the land of Hind from the filth of in-
fidelity and vice and freed the whole of that country from the thorn of
God-plurality and the impurity of idol-worship, and by his royal vigour
and intrepidity left not one temple standing.”®

The jihad continued relentlessly. In 1234, Aibak’s successor, Sham-
suddin Iltutmish, invaded Malwa in west-central India and destroyed an
ancient Hindu temple at Vidisha, The sixteenth-century Muslim histo-
rian Abdul Qadir Badauni recounted that Shamsuddin imitated Mah-
moud of Ghazni in using the destruction of the Hindu idols to portray
the victory of Allah and Islam: “Having destroyed the idol temple of
Ujjain which had been built six hundred years previously, and was called
Mahakal, he leveled it to its foundations, and threw down the image of
Rai Vikramajit from whom the Hindus reckon their era, and brought
certain images of cast molten brass and placed them on the ground in
front of the doors of mosques of old Delhi and ordered the people to
trample them under foot.””

The Hindus resisted wherever they could, but the Muslim response
to such effrontery was ruthless. In 1254, the Mamluk sultan Ghiyasud-
din Balban left Delhi and crossed the Ganges with a jihad force. Badaunt
stated that “in two days after leaving Delhi, he arrived in the midst of
the territory of Katihar and put to death every male, even those of eight
years of age, and bound the women.”

In the same year that his fellow jihadis were destroying the last of
the Crusader states, 1291, the Muslim warrior Jalaluddin Khalji, who es-
tablished the Khalji sultanate in Delhi, led a jihad foray to Ranthambhor,
destroying Hindu temples along the way. Emulating other jihad leaders

178 THe History or Jinap: Prom MunamMan To ISIS

in India, he ordered that the broken pieces of the Hindu idols be sent to
Delhi, where they were to be placed, in what was by now a time-honored
Islamic practice, at the entrance of the Jama mosque, so that the faithful
would trample them on their way into the mosque to pray, and again on
the way out.*

The following year, Jalaluddin’s nephew Alauddin, who was to succeed
him, led a jihad force to Vidisha. Badauni said that Alauddin “brought
much booty to the Sultan and the idol which was the object of worship
of the Hindus, he caused to be cast in front of the Badaun gate to be
trampled upon by the people.” Jihad and humiliating the Hindus were
profitable for Alauddin personally: “The services of Alauddin were highly

E7

appreciated, the jagir of Oudh also was added to his other estates.

The Islamic state in India

Despite these powerful appeals to embrace Islam, however, many Hin-
dus still resisted, and the jihad went on. The Hindus had good reason
to resist, as the society that the Muslim overlords established was hardly
a pleasant one for them. Muhammad ibn Qasim’s granting of People of
the Book status to the Hindus alleviated the misery of the conquered
people to some degree, but only marginally. Around the turn of the
fourteenth century, the sultan Alauddin Khalji asked the Islamic schol-
ar Qazi Mughisuddin about the legal status of the Hindus within his
domains and the permissibility of conferring dhimmi status upon them.
The gazt answered:

These are called payers of tribute, and when the revenue
officer demands silver from them, they should without
question, and with all humility and respect, tender gold. If
the officer throws dirt in their mouths, they must without
reluctance open their mouths wide to receive it.... The due
subordination of the Dhimmi is exhibited in this humble
payment, and by this throwing of dirt in their mouths. The
glorification of Islam is a duty, and contempt for religion
is vain. God holds them in contempt, for he says, “Keep

CHAPTER Five 179

them in subjection.” To keep the Hindus in abasement is
especially a religious duty, because they are the most in-
veterate enemies of the Prophet, and because the Prophet
has commanded us to slay them, plunder them, and make
them captive, saying, “Convert them to Islam or kill them,
and make them slaves, and spoil their wealth and property.”
No doctor but the great doctor [Hanifah], to whose school
we belong, has assented to the imposition of jizya on Hin-

dus; doctors of other schools allow no other alternative but
“Death or Islam.”®*

The Hanifah was one of the four principal Sunni schools of Islamic law.
The gazis ruling was in accord with a manual of Islamic law that direct-
ed that “the main object in levying the tax is the subjection of infidels to
humiliation...and...during the process of payment, the Zimm? is seized
by the collar and vigorously shaken and pulled about in order to show
him his degradation.”

The fourteenth-century Muslim political theorist Ziauddin Bara-
ni, a high official in the Delhi sultanate, directed that even Hindus who
converted to Islam were not to be accepted as equals, but to be treated
with continued contempt: “Teachers are to be sternly ordered not to thrust
precious stones [scriptures] down the throats of dogs [converts].’To shop-
keepers and the low born they are to teach nothing more than the rules
about prayer, fasting, religious charity and the Hajj pilgrimage along with
some chapters of the Quran...they are to be instructed in nothing more....
The low born are capable of only vices.””” The power of the Muslim state
was the military, which was made up of Muslims. Even Muslims from
other lands, including those who were illiterate or otherwise incompetent,
received preferential treatment over Hindus for government positions, and
here, as in Muslim Spain, the placement of a dhimmi in a position of au-
thority and responsibility was viewed inconsistent with the state of humil-
iation in which he was supposed to be living.”

The fourteenth-century Sufi scholar and poet Amir Khusrau looked
around at the society thus created and liked what he saw. “Happy Hin-
dustan,” he exclaimed, “the splendor of Religion, where the Law finds
perfect honour and security. The whole country, by means of the sword
of our holy warriors, has become like a forest denuded of its thorns by

180 Tue History of Jinan: From MunamMMan to ISIS

fire.... Islam is triumphant, idolatry is subdued. Had not the Law grant-
ed exemption from death by the payment of poll-tax, the very name of
Hind, root and branch, would have been extinguished.””? That the name
remained he regarded as an example of Islamic tolerance; the Hindus
under the rule of the Muslims had a different view.

PDF created by Rajesh Arya - Gujarat

CHAPTER SIX

THE JIHAD ADVANCES
INTO EUROPE

Jthad tn the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries

I. THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE
BYZANTINE EMPIRE

The Coming of the Ottomans

No sooner had the last Crusader state in the Holy Land been extin-
guished than the Muslims began to move toward realizing Saladin’s as-
piration to take the jihad back to the homes of the Crusaders. The Seljuk
sultanate of Rum had been weakened by the Crusades and a Mongol in-
vasion, and ultimately dissolved into a group of smaller Turkish states in
Asia Minor. The chieftain of one of these, a warrior named Osman, be-
gan conducting jihad raids into Byzantine territory. Osman was a fiercely
pious Muslim. Legend had it that after he spent one night devoutly
reading the Qur’an instead of sleeping, an angel came to him with a
message from Allah: “Since thou hast read my eternal word with so great
respect, thy children and the children of thy children shall be honoured
from generation to generation.”

Osman began to win those honors in 1301, just ten years after the
Muslim conquest of the last of the Crusader states, when his jihadis
routed a Byzantine force at Bapheus, near Nicaea. Osman, motivated by
the Islamic doctrine that land once ruled by Muslims belonged by right

182 THe History or Jistap: From MunwaAmMaApD To JSIS

to Islam forever (succinctly stated in the Qur’an in the command “drive
them out from where they drove you out,” 2:191), was determined to re-
capture Nicaea itself, which had been the capital of the sultanate of Rum
but had been retaken by the Byzantines in 1147.°

The great warrior did not, however, realize that aspiration before he
died in 1324. His successor, Orkhan, succeeded in conquering Nicaea in
1331, and continued Osman’s work of consolidating the Turkish states of
Asia Minor under his rule. The resulting sultanate and future caliphate
and empire bore the name of its first leader, Osman, and became known
in English as the Ottoman Empire. The Ottomans were able to gain
control over the other small Turkish states of the region because, it was
said, of their indefatigable commitment to jihad.* Their rigor was rein-
forced by Islamic scholars of the day such as Ibn Taymiyya (1263-1328),
who declared that a Muslim ruler who did not enforce all the precepts of
Sharia forfeited his right to rule.* The Ottomans scrupulously avoided
such challenges to their authority.

Disunity
In 1332, when King Philip VI of France was considering mounting a

new Crusade, a German priest named Brocardus wrote to warn him
about the Assassins:

The Assassins...are to be cursed and fled. They sell them-
selves, are thirsty for human blood, kill the innocent for
a price, and care nothing for either life or salvation. Like
the devil, they transfigure themselves into angels of light,
by imitating the gestures, garments, languages, customs
and acts of various nations and peoples; thus, hidden in
sheep’s clothing, they suffer death as soon as they are rec-
ognized.... So execrable is their profession, and so abom-
inated by all, that they conceal their own names as much
as they can. I therefore know only one single remedy for
the safeguarding and protection of the king, that in all the
royal household, for whatever service, however small or

CHAPTER SIX 183

brief or mean, none should be admitted, save those whose
country, place, lineage, condition and person are certainly,
fully and clearly known.’

But a much greater threat to the Christians came from within. The Mus-
lims were aided in their jihad, as jihadis so often were throughout the
history of Islam, by shortsighted Christians. Then, as now, business con-
siderations frequently overrode concern among Christians about what
the jihadis were doing. In 1335, the Republic of Ragusa concluded a
commercial treaty with the Ottomans, giving the people of Ragusa the
right to market their wares within Ottoman domains and to sail the
seas without worrying about Ottoman pirates. The Sultan could not
write, so he marked the treaty with his thumbprint.® Four years later, the
Byzantine emperor Andronicus III Paleologus sent the monk Barlaam,
who had been born in Italy, to Avignon to meet Pope Benedict XII and
appeal to him for an ecumenical council to heal the schism between the
churches, and for a new Crusade against the Ottomans,

“Most holy father,” said Barlaam to Benedict, “the emperor is not
less desirous than yourself of a union between the two churches: but in
this delicate transaction, he is obliged to respect his own dignity and
the prejudices of his subjects. The ways of union are twofold; force and
persuasion.” Force, he said, had been tried when the Latins “subdued
the empire, without subduing the minds, of the Greeks,” and at the sup-
posed reunion Council of Lyons in 1274, where the Byzantines had not
had a say. Barlaam advised that “a well-chosen legate should be sent
into Greece, to convene the patriarchs of Constantinople, Alexandria,
Antioch, and Jerusalem; and, with their aid, to prepare a free and uni-
versal synod.” He reminded the pope that “the empire is assaulted and
endangered by the Turks, who have occupied four of the greatest cities of
Anatolia. The Christian inhabitants have expressed a wish of returning
to their allegiance and religion; but the forces and revenues of the em-
peror are insufficient for their deliverance: and the Roman legate must
be accompanied, or preceded, by an army of Franks, to expel the infidels,
and open a way to the holy sepulchre.””

Pope Benedict was unmoved. He sent back a haughty refusal, in-

184 Tye History oF Jinan: From MuyaAmMMAD TO ISIS

sultingly addressing the emperor of the Romans as the “moderator of the
Greeks,” and the Eastern patriarchs as “the persons who style themselves
the patriarchs of the Eastern churches.”* He appeared thoroughly un-
troubled by the prospect of the destruction of the Byzantine Empire and
the advance of the jihad into Europe. Not until the days of Pope Francis
would the See of Rome have an occupant more useful to the jihad force
than Benedict XII.

There was never any shortage of blinkered Christians. In the early
fourteenth century, the Byzantine emperor Andronicus II hired a corps
of Catalan mercenaries; the Byzantines had engaged mercenaries for
centuries, with varying degrees of success. This time, it was an unmiti-
gated disaster: the Catalan mercenaries quarreled with their Byzantine
employers, caused unrest in Constantinople, and finally turned openly
against them, asking the Turks—the people they had come to fight—
for help in creating their own state at Gallipoli, on the European side
of the Hellespont.’

The Ottomans, of course, were only too happy to help the osten-
sibly Christian Catalans and quickly established substantial forces in
Thrace and Macedonia. The leader of this detachment, Halil, agreed
to withdraw, but then reneged when the Byzantines demanded that his
forces surrender the booty they had seized in Thrace. In an initial clash,
Halil and his jihadis soundly defeated the forces of Byzantine emperor
Michael IX Paleologus, who had to flee for his life, leaving behind his
imperial helmet, which Halil promptly donned to mock the great em-
peror of the Romans.”® Finally Michael was able to summon a force of
Serbians that drove Halil and his men from Europe, only to have one of
his successors invite the Turks back several decades later.

Allying with the Jihad

In 1345, the Byzantine emperor John VI Cantacuzenus asked for help
from the Turks amid a dynastic dispute that had escalated into a full-
scale civil war. Orkhan agreed to help if John gave him his daughter,
Theodora, in marriage. Expediency swept away all considerations of
outraged pride and of the travesty of a Christian princess’ being given in

CHAPTER SIX 185

marriage to a non-Christian sovereign; John either had to agree or give
up his claim to the imperial throne, and he wasn't about to do that.

Gibbon described the bizarre scene as the daughter of the Chris-
tian emperor was given in marriage to a warrior king whose coreligion-
ists had been trying to destroy that Christian empire for nearly seven
hundred years:

A body of Turkish cavalry attended the ambassadors, who
disembarked from thirty vessels, before his camp of Selybria.
A stately pavilion was erected, in which the empress Irene
passed the night with her daughters. In the morning, Theo-
dora ascended a throne, which was surrounded with curtains
of silk and gold: the troops were under arms; but the emper-
or alone was on horseback. Ata signal the curtains were sud-
denly withdrawn to disclose the bride, or the victim, encir-
cled by kneeling eunuchs and hymeneal torches: the sound
of flutes and trumpets proclaimed the joyful event; and her
pretended happiness was the theme of the nuptial song,
which was chanted by such poets as the age could produce.

Without the rites of the church, Theodora was deliv-
ered to her barbarous lord: but it had been stipulated, that
she should preserve her religion in the harem of Bursa; and
her father celebrates her charity and devotion in this am-
biguous situation.

After his peaceful establishment on the throne of Con-
stantinople, the Greek emperor visited his Turkish ally, who
with four sons, by various wives, expected him at Scutari, on
the Asiatic shore. The two princes partook, with seeming
cordiality, of the pleasures of the banquet and the chase;
and Theodora was permitted to repass the Bosphorus, and
to enjoy some days in the society of her mother.”

Belying this pleasant scene, Orkhan had insisted that his treaty with the
Byzantines should allow him to sell his prisoners of war as slaves in Con-
stantinople. Gibbon recounted: “A naked crowd of Christians of both
sexes and every age, of priests and monks, of matrons and virgins, was
exposed in the public market; the whip was frequently used to quicken

186 Tue History or Jinap: From MuvHamMMAD TO ISIS

the charity of redemption; and the indigent Greeks deplored the fate
of their brethren, who were led away to the worst evils of temporal and
spiritual bondage.”

Their fate was a more reliable indication of what John VI Canta-
cuzenus had gotten into than the wedding banquet. Ottoman warriors of
jihad soon arrived in Europe to help John, crossing over the Dardanelles
in 1348 and occupying Gallipoli in 1354. But how much the cordial
scene at the wedding ran contrary to reality quickly became apparent.
When Genoa went to war with the Byzantines soon after the treaty be-
tween John and Orkhan was concluded, Orkhan switched sides without
hesitation and aided the Genoese against the Byzantines.'’ The warriors
of jihad, after all, had been trying to conquer the Byzantine empire since
711; if the Genoese were working to weaken the Byzantines, the jihadis
could count them as friends.

The Genoese and Venetians concluded treaties with the Byzantines
in 1355. The treaties included the promise that they would defend the
Christian empire against its enemies, but specifically exempted “Morat
Bey and his Turks,” that is, Murad, Orkhan’s son and the effective rul-
er of the sultanate during his father’s dotage.' Genoa and Venice had
business interests with the Ottomans that precluded their going to war
with them. Genoa even entered into a pact of friendship with “the mag-
nificent and powerful lord of lords, Moratibei.”!° Yet consistency was
not the Genoese’s strong suit. Both Genoa and Venice tried to play both
sides against each other; in 1356, they joined an alliance “against that
Turk, son of unrighteousness and evil, and enemy of the Holy Cross,
Morat Bey and his sect, who are attempting so grievously to attack the
Christian race.”"

It was rare for the Christians of the West to express such concerns.
Nor did they do much to stop Murad from attacking “the Christian
race.” In 1357, jihadis under Murad’s command captured the imposing
Byzantine fortress of Adrianople, the third most important city in the
Byzantine Empire, after Constantinople and Thessalonica.

That same year, pirates kidnapped the son of Orkhan and Theodo-
ra. Demonstrating his power over the Byzantines, Orkhan ordered the
emperor John V Paleologus to rescue him personally. John duly besieged

CHAPTER SIx 187

Phocaea on the west coast of Asia Minor, where the pirates were holding
the young man, but ultimately the troops under John’s command refused
to continue the siege, and the emperor had to report shamefacedly to
Orkhan that he could not complete the task he had been ordered to do.”

The Janissaries

With the Ottomans now ruling over a substantial population of Chris-
tians, in 1359, Murad founded the janissary corps, a crack force of young
men who were seized as boys from their Christian families, enslaved,
and forcibly converted to Islam. This was the seizure and enslavement of
twenty percent of the Christian children from predominantly Christian
areas of the Ottoman Empire. These boys, once seized from their fam-
ilies, were given the choice of Islam or death. Those who chose Islam
were, after rigorous training, enrolled in the janissary corps, the emper-
or’s crack troops.

All of this was in accord with Islamic law. It was Murad’s vizier, or
chief minister, who reminded him that the Qur’an entitled him to take
twenty percent of the spoils of war that the Muslims had won: “And
know that anything you obtain of war booty, then indeed, for Allah 1s
one fifth of it and for the Messenger and for near relatives and the or-
phans, the needy, and the traveler, if you have believed in Allah and in
that which We sent down to Our Servant on the day of criterion, the
day when the two armies met. And Allah, over all things, is compe-
tent.” (8:41) Who stood in the place of Allah and his Messenger but
the caliph? And the twenty percent of the spoils meant that Murad and
the Muslims were entitled to the labors of twenty percent of the young
Christian boys in the lands they had conquered.

Gibbon recorded that the vizier suggested that “the duty might eas-
ily be levied, if vigilant officers were stationed in Gallipoli, to watch the
passage, and to select for his use the stoutest and most beautiful of the
Christian youth.”"* Murad liked the idea. “The advice was followed: the
edict was proclaimed; many thousands of the European captives were
educated in religion and arms; and the new militia was consecrated and
named by a celebrated dervish. Standing in the front of their ranks, he
stretched the sleeve of his gown over the head of the foremost soldier,

188 THe Hisrory or JinAD: FRom MunAMMAD TO ISIS

and his blessing was delivered in these words: ‘Let them be called [Yengi
cheri, or new soldiers]; may their countenance be ever bright! their hand
victorious! their sword keen! may their spear always hang over the heads
of their enemies! and wheresoever they go, may they return with a white
face!” “Yengi chert” became “janissaries” in the West.

Some Christian families actually welcomed the seizure of their chil-
dren, for this at least was a way out of the miserable life of the ddimmz and
a chance to advance in Ottoman society. Nevertheless, Godfrey Goodwin,
historian of the janissary corps, painted a romanticized but still inescap-
ably grim picture of the recruitment of these young Christians:

Whatever ambitions families might or might not have,
it was an unhappy day when the troops trudged into the
village, hungry and thirsty. The priest was ready with his
baptismal rolls and so were the boys with their fathers;
in theory mothers and sisters were left to weep at home.
Then each of the recruits had to be examined both physi-
cally and mentally.... Once the selection process was com-
pleted, the roll was drawn up in duplicate.... Now was the
time for tears and some farewells must have been poignant
but the boys tramped the dusty roads side by side with
friends and all had the excitement of starting out on an
adventure. They could dream of promotion and fortune
while the peasants returned to their fields, doubtless to
weep longer than their sons.”°

Gibbon noted what a terrifying force was thereby created:

Such was the origin of these haughty troops, the terror of
the nations, and sometimes of the sultans themselves. Their
valour has declined, their discipline is relaxed, and their tu-
multuary array is incapable of contending with the order
and weapons of modern tactics; but at the time of their in-
stitution, they possessed a decisive superiority in war; since
a regular body of infantry, in constant exercise and pay, was
not maintained by any of the princes of Christendom."

CHAPTER Stx 189

At first these boys were torn from their homes and families only at irreg-
ular intervals—sometimes every seven years and sometimes every four—
but after some time, the devshirme became an annual event.” By the time
it ended, in the late seventeenth century, around two hundred thousand
boys had been enslaved in this manner,”

The janissaries became the Ottoman Empire’s most formidable
warriors against Christianity. The collection of boys for this corps in
some places became an annual event: Christian fathers were forced to
appear in the town squares with their sons; the Muslims took the stron-
gest and brightest young men, who never saw their homes again unless
they happened to be part of a Muslim fighting force sent to that area.

The Christians in the West, if they knew about this at all, were un-
moved either by the dewshirme or by the ongoing plight of the Christians
in the East. For all too many, the Great Schism overrode all other con-
siderations and militated against a sense of perspective. Even the great
Renaissance scholar and poet Petrarch wrote in the 1360s to Pope Urban
V: “The Osmanlis are merely enemies, but the schismatic Greeks are
worse than enemies.””4

And so the Muslims were in Europe to stay, and they continued
their jihad to expand their European domains. With Europe disunited
and distracted, and the Byzantines essentially their vassals, they were
able to seize ever-larger tracts of European land: Greece, Bulgaria, Ser-
bia, Macedonia, Albania, Croatia, and more.

The Vassal Byzantine Emperors

In 1362 in Adrianople, which he renamed Edirne, Murad proclaimed
himself the caliph of all the Muslims. It would take over a century for
this claim to gain significant traction, but ultimately the Ottoman ca-
liphate would be the last one to command the allegiance of a significant
percentage of Muslims worldwide.

Like Orkhan before him, Murad delighted in reminding John V
Paleologus of his vassal status. When John’s son Andronicus formed an
alliance with Murad’s son Sauzes (Gibbon said they had “an intimate
and guilty friendship”) and both rebelled against their fathers, Murad
unhesitatingly had Sauzes blinded and demanded that John do the same

190 Tue History of Jinap: From MuniaAMMapD TO ISIS

with Andronicus.** The emperor, said Gibbon, “trembled and obeyed,”
but ensured that the operation was performed so ineptly that Androni-
cus ended up blind in only one eye.”

On June 15, 1389, the jihadis engaged Christian forces in battle at
Kosovo. As in the early days of jihad, the Muslims prevailed against a
stronger, larger force of Serbs and Bulgarians, burning June 15 into the
Serbian national consciousness as a day of mourning forever after. The
jihad force was composed largely of janissaries. Said Gibbon:

The Janizaries fought with the zeal of proselytes against
their idolatrous countrymen; and in the battle of Cossova
[Kosovo], the league and independence of the Sclavonian
tribes was finally crushed. As the conqueror walked over the
field, he observed that the greatest part of the slain consist-
ed of beardless youths; and listened to the flattering reply of
his vizier, that age and wisdom would have taught them not
to oppose his irresistible arms.?”

The fulsome praise was premature. As Murad traversed the bloody bat-
tleground, stepping over the corpses, a Serbian soldier suddenly appeared
and stabbed him before his men could react. At the moment of his great
triumph, he was dead.

But, of course, the jihad in Eastern Europe and against the Byzan-
tines continued. Perhaps anticipating further inroads against the Byz-
antines, Murad’s successor, Bayezid I, bestowed upon himself the title
Sultan of Rum, that is, of the Roman Empire, and played the various
claimants to the Byzantine imperial crown against each other, seeking
always to weaken them all, and ultimately to subvert the small rem-
nants of the Christian empire altogether.** To remind the Byzantines
that they were vassals of the sultan, Bayezid demanded that John V
Paleologus’ son Manuel live at his court. John had to comply, and at the
sultan’s court, Manuel was subjected to regular mockery and humilia-
tion.” When John began work to strengthen the walls of Constantino-
ple, Bayezid forced him to stop almost immediately by threatening to
have Manuel blinded.*°

When John V Paleologus died in 1390, which some attributed to
the constant humiliations to which Bayezid had subjected him, Manuel

CHAPTER S1x 191

managed to escape from the sultan’s court and take his place as Emperor
Manvel II Paleologus. Bayezid continued to taunt him from afar, re-
minding him that by this time his “imperial” holdings consisted of little
more than the city of Constantinople itself. He forced Manuel to set up
an area in Constantinople where Turkish merchants could hawk their
wares, as well as, more ominously, erect a mosque staffed by a cadi, a
judge of Islamic law.?! He even demanded, and received, Manuel’s agree-
ment to set aside a quarter of the city to be settled by Muslims.”

In 1391, he forced Manuel, as his vassal, to march with him into
central Asia Minor in order to fight the Isfendiyarids, another Mus-
lim dynasty that controlled part of the territory south of the Black Sea.
Manuel wrote from this desolate area and revealed his own desolation:

Certainly the Romans had a name for the small plain where
we are now when they lived and ruled here.... There are
many cities here, but they lack what constitutes the true
splendor of a city...that is, human beings. Most now lie in
ruins...not even the names have survived.... I cannot tell
you exactly where we are.... It is hard to bear all this...the
scarcity of supplies, the severity of winter and the sickness
which has struck down many of our men...[have] greatly
depressed me.... It is unbearable...to be unable to see any-
thing, hear anything, do anything during all this time which
could somehow...lift our spirit.... The blame lies with the
present state of affairs, not to mention the individual [i-e.
Bayezid] whose fault they are.**

To forestall help coming to the Byzantines from Hungary or others in Eu-
rope, Bayezid worked to strengthen the Ottoman position in southeastern
Europe, conquering Thessaly and Bulgaria in 1393. In 1394 he began a
new siege of Constantinople, which turned out to be the longest ever, last-
ing eight years. Bayezid summoned Manuel and some key members of the
Byzantine imperial court to his presence, planning to kill them all; most of
them, however, managed to get out alive, including the emperor himself,
who thereafter ignored all of the sultan’s summonses to appear.**

At Nicopolis in western Greece in 1396, Bayezid defeated a force
of a hundred thousand Christian Crusaders that had been gathered by

192 THe History or Jinwap: From MunaAmMAD To ISIS

King Sigismund of Hungary. Flush with victory, Bayezid boasted that he
would soon lay siege to Buda in Hungary, and then move on to conquer
Germany and Italy for Allah, finally putting a cap to it all by feeding his
horse with a bushel of oats placed on the altar of St. Peter's in the Vati-
can.*5 But instead, the would-be conqueror of Europe suffered an attack
of gout and had to return home.

Tamerlane versus Bayezid

Manuel tried to get help from everywhere he possibly could. A hundred
years earlier, there had been talk of a Christian alliance with the Mon-
gols against the Muslims; nothing had come of it, but maybe it wasn’t
too late: in 1399, Manuel appealed to Timur the Lame, or Tamerlane,
the Mongol conqueror of Central Asia.*° The Mongols had converted
to Islam in the early fourteenth century, and Tamerlane was a zealous
jihadi. However, he had not hesitated to fight against the Tughlaq sul-
tanate of Delhi, and he regarded the Ottomans in the same way, writing
with stinging contempt to Bayezid:

Dost thou not know, that the greatest part of Asia is subject
to our arms and our laws? That our invincible forces ex-
tend from one sea to the other? That the potentates of the
earth form a line before our gate? And that we have com-
pelled Fortune herself to watch over the prosperity of our
empire. What is the foundation of thy insolence and folly?
Thou hast fought some battles in the woods of Anatolia;
contemptible trophies! Thou hast obtained some victories
over the Christians of Europe; thy sword was blessed by
the apostle of God; and thy obedience to the precept of
the Koran, in waging war against the infidels, is the sole
consideration that prevents us from destroying thy coun-
try, the frontier and bulwark of the Moslem world. Be wise
in time; reflect; repent; and avert the thunder of our ven-
geance, which is yet suspended over thy head. Thou art no
more than a pismire; why wilt thou seek to provoke the
elephants? Alas! They will trample thee under their feet.2”

CHAPTER S1x 193

Bayezid was used to terrorizing and lording it over the emperors of the
Romans; he wasn’t used to being addressed the way he addressed them.
He wrote back to Tamerlane with his own boasts:

Thy armies are innumerable: be they so; but what are the
arrows of the flying Tartar against the cimeters [scimitars]
and battle-axes of my firm and invincible Janizaries? I] will
guard the princes who have implored my protection: seek
them in my tents. The cities of Arzingan and Erzeroum are
mine; and unless the tribute be duly paid, I will demand the
arrears under the walls of Tauris and Sultania.**

In his rage and wounded pride, Bayezid could not resist adding a per-
sonal insult:

If] fly from thy arms, may my wives be thrice divorced from
my bed: but if thou hast not courage to meet me in the field,
mayest thou again receive ‘Ay wives after they have thrice
endured the embraces of a stranger.*”

It was the ultimate insult one jihad warrior could give to another: the
implication that he was not man enough ether to fight or to hold on to
his wives. Tamerlane answered on the battlefield, invading Asia Minor
and soundly defeating Bayezid at Ankara in 1402.

Tamerlane then granted clemency to his beaten rival, even as (in
another move characteristic of jihadis throughout history) he blamed
him for the conflict:

Alas! The decree of fate is now accomplished by your own
fault; it is the web which you have woven, the thorns of
the tree which yourself have planted. I wished to spare, and
even to assist, the champion of the Moslems; you braved
our threats; you despised our friendship; you forced us to
enter your kingdom with our invincible armies. Behold the
event. Had you vanquished, ] am not ignorant of the fate
which you seserved for myself and my troops. But I disdain
to retaliate: your life and honour are secure; and [I shail ex-
press my gratitude to God by my clemency to man.”

194 Tue History of Jinan: From MufammMapb To ISIS

Tamerlane’s clemency to Bayezid was more proclaimed than actual. Out-
doing Bayezid’s own humiliation of the Byzantine emperors, Tamerlane
had Bayezid displayed in an iron cage, and used the Ottoman sultan as
an ottoman, as well as a mounting block when he got on his horse. He
commandeered Bayezid’s harem, and perhaps remembering Bayezid’s
boast about his wives, forced one of the sultan’s wives to serve at his table
while naked. After enduring eight months of this, Bayezid died.”
When Bayezid died, Tamerlane was in Asia, on his way to bring
the jihad to China. Given the news that Bayezid had died, he wept and
claimed that he had planned to restore Bayezid to the throne, with great-

er grandeur than ever.”

Last-ditch Attempts to Save the
Byzantine Empire

The claim was easy to make when Bayezid was dead. In any case, Tamer-
lane’s desire to destroy all rival Muslim leaders won for the Byzantine
Empire a bit of much-needed time, although Tamerlane ensured that
no one would think he was allying with the Christians when he also
besieged and conquered Smyrna, defeating a force of Christian Knights
Hospitaller. Ships arrived to reinforce the knights after Tamerlane had
already entered the city and laid waste; the great commander ordered
that his catapults be fitted with the bloody severed heads of the knights
the jihadis had killed inside Smyrna. After a barrage of these heads filled
the sky and hit the men on the ships, the reinforcing vessels turned back
in horror and disarray.“

Emperor Manuel had in 1399 embarked upon an extensive four-year
tour of Western Europe, meeting with the pope and with the crowned
kings of England, France, and elsewhere. Lofty promises were made, but
little actual help was forthcoming, in part because the Western Europe-
ans were keen for Manuel to accept the authority of the pope, which the
empcror could not do without alienating a substantial number of his own
people. Manuel said this of the Ottomans to his chamberlain Phranzes:

Our last resource is their fear of our union with the Latins,
of the warlike nations of the West, who may arm for our

CHAPTER SIX 195

relief and for their destruction. As often as you are threat-
ened by the miscreants, present this danger before their
eyes. Propose a council; consult on the means; but ever de-
Jay and avoid the convocation of an assembly, which cannot
tend either to our spiritual or temporal emolument. The
Latins are proud; the Greeks are obstinate; neither party
will recede or retract; and the attempt of a perfect union
will confirm the schism, alienate the churches, and leave us,
without hope or defence, at the mercy of the Barbarians.”

Yet Manuel kept trying. In 1424, when he was seventy-four years old,
he yet again sought help from the Hungarians against the Turks and
was, once again, unsuccessful. The Ottomans forced him to agree to pay
tribute to the sultan, reinforcing the status of the Byzantine Empire as a
mere vassal of the Ottoman sultanate.

Manuel II Paleologus Becomes Notorious.

Manuel IH Paleologus, little remembered after his death, shot to fame
nearly six hundred years later, when on September 12, 2006, in Regens-
burg, Germany, Pope Benedict XVI dared to enunciate some truths
about Islam that proved to be unpopular and unwelcome among Mus-
lims worldwide. Most notoriously, the pope quoted Manuel on Islam:
“Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you
will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread
by the sword the faith he preached.”

Manuel was not speaking of an abstract threat he had read about in
books. Every day of his life, he was confronted by the ever-advancing
and implacable menace of jihad. All his life, he had experienced Islam
and jihad firsthand, as well as the contempt that Islam mandated for
non-Muslims: “Muhammad is the apostle of Allah. Those who follow
him are merciful to one another, harsh to unbelievers” (Qur’an 48:29).
His life was many times in imminent danger from the warriors of jihad.
He no doubt heard of the misery of many Christians who, because
of the Ottoman conquests, found themselves subject to harsh rulers
who believed they had a divine mandate to subjugate the Christians
and relegate them to second-class status in society, if not death. In the

196 Tue History oF Jinap: From MuitamMMApb To ISIS

twenty-first century, Manuel’s words were denounced as “Islamopho-
bic”; yet, no one among his contemporaries would assert something so
naive and unrealistic.

Pope Benedict also quoted Manuel saying: “God is not pleased by
blood—and not acting reasonably is contrary to God’s nature. Faith is
born of the soul, not the body. Whoever would lead someone to faith
needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly, without violence
and threats.... To convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong
arm, or weapons of any kind, or any other means of threatening a person
with death.””

Benedict’s quotations of the long-dead emperor were not received by
reasonable souls, at least among the descendants of those who had men-
aced Manuel II Paleologus and his people throughout that unfortunate
emperor's lifetime. Muslims rioted and, in several countries, murdered
Christians who had, of course, nothing whatsoever to do with what Pope
Benedict had said. Several days after the Regensburg address, a group
of Muslim clerics in Gaza issued an invitation to the pope to convert to
Islam, or else: “We want to use the words of the Prophet Muhammad
and tell the pope: “As/im Taslam’—that is, embrace Islam and you will be
safe.” The implication, of course, was that the one to whom this “invita-
tion” was addressed would of be safe if he declined to convert.

Many Christians in Eastern Europe would receive that “invitation”
in the years following Tamerlane’s siege of Smyrna. But the Byzantines
made one more attempt to stave off the inevitable when they agreed to
travel to Italy for another attempt at reunion with the Latin Church. The
council convened in Ferrara in April 1438, with the emperor John VIII
Paleologus and the patriarch Joseph II of Constantinople present, head-
ing up a large Byzantine delegation. Their appearance was impressive,
but the Byzantines were in desperate straits and had no bargaining posi-
tion at all. As the council’s deliberations went on, transferred to Florence
in January 1439 to avoid the Black Plague, the Byzantine delegation
gave in on every one of the theological issues that had formally divided
the two Churches since the Great Schism of 1054. Finally they agreed
to a reunion with the Latin Church based essentially on acceptance of all
the Western Church's doctrines.

CHAPTER Six 197

One Byzantine bishop present, Mark of Ephesus, refused to go along
and argued strenuously against the council’s conclusions; he proved to
be an apt representative of the popular feeling about the council back
in Constantinople, where it was generally considered illegitimate and
never gained significant support among the people. Lukas Notaras,
megadux of the Byzantine Empire—that is, commander-in-chief of the
imperial navy and de facto prime minister—summed up a widespread
opinion with the succinct phrase “Better the turban of the Sultan than
the tiara of the Pope.”””

It may seem incredible considering the carnage that followed the
Muslim conquest that anyone could have seriously held such a view,
but Lukas Notaras said this defore the Muslim conquest of Constanti-
nople. The Crusader sacking of Constantinople in 1204 was still a fresh
memory for many Byzantines, and the subsequent establishment of a
Latin patriarchate, combined with the intransigence of the Latins at
Florence, led many Byzantines to believe that the sultan would at least
allow them to maintain their religion and culture, while the pope would
not—a not unreasonable surmise. Many Byzantine emperors had made
accords with the Ottomans. No doubt many believed that the jihadis
were a problem that had been managed in the past and could continue
to be managed, while the pope's demands were absolute.

And so the reunion that was concluded at the Council of Florence, al-
though officially proclaimed, never gained significant traction in the East.
Nor did the expected military help make any difference. Pope Eugenius
IV did call a new Crusade, but there was no enthusiasm for it in Western
Europe. The Eastern European states of Poland, Wallachia, and Hungary
did manage to assemble a Crusader army of thirty thousand men, only to
see it crushed by Murad II and his jihadis at Varna in Hungary in No-
vember 1444, King Ladislas of Hungary was killed in the battle; his head
was sent back to Bursa, the Asia Minor city that had served as the first
capital of the Ottoman sultanate, where it was carried through the streets
as a trophy of the Muslims’ victory over the Crusaders.”

198 Tur Hisrory oF JinwtAD: FRom MuwaMMAD TO ISIS

The Fall of Constantinople

In 1451, Murad II’s son succeeded his father as the sultan Mehmet II
and brought to the sultanate his intense desire to be the conqueror of
Constantinople. It wasn’t long before he got his wish. After over seven
hundred years of trying, the warriors of jihad finally entered the great
city on May 29, 1453. When they did, they made the streets run with
rivers of blood. Historian Steven Runciman notes that the Muslims
“slew everyone that they met in the streets, men, women, and children
without discrimination. The blood ran in rivers down the steep streets
from the heights of Petra toward the Golden Horn. But soon the lust for
slaughter was assuaged. The soldiers realized that captives and precious
objects would bring them greater profit.”*!

Muslims raided monasteries and convents, emptying them of their
inhabitants, and phindered private houses. They entered the Hagia So-
phia, which for nearly a thousand years had been the grandest church
in Christendom. The faithful had gathered within its hallowed walls to
pray during the city’s last agony. The Muslims halted the celebration of
Orthros (morning prayer), while the priests, according to legend, took the
sacred vessels and disappeared into the cathedral’s eastern wall, through
which they shall return to complete the divine service one day. The
Muslims then killed the elderly and weak and led the rest off into slavery.

The Byzantine scholar Bessarion wrote to the Doge of Venice in
July 1453, saying that Constantinople had been

...sacked by the most inhuman barbarians and the most
savage enemies of the Christian faith, by the fiercest of
wild beasts. The public treasure has been consumed, private
wealth has been destroyed, the temples have been stripped
of gold, silver, jewels, the relics of the saints, and other most
precious ornaments. Men have been butchered like cattle,
women abducted, virgins ravished, and children snatched
from the arms of their parents.*

Islamic tradition held that Muhammad himself had prophesied the
Muslim conquest of Constantinople, as well as of Rome itself, which
remains an object of jihadi desire to this day. The modern-day Sheikh

CHAPTER SIX 199

Yusuf al-Qaradawi, in writing about “signs of the victory of Islam,” re-
ferred to a hadith:

The Prophet Muhammad was asked: “What city will be
conquered first, Constantinople or Romiyya [Rome]?” He
answered: “The city of Hirqil [ruled by the Byzantine em-
peror Heraclius] will be conquered first”—that is, Con-
stantinople—Romiyya is the city called today ‘Rome,’ the
capital of Italy. The city of Hirqil [that is, Constantinople]
was conquered by the young 23-year-old Ottoman Mu-
hammad bin Morad, known in history as Muhammad the
Conqueror, in 1453, The other city, Romiyya, remains, and
we hope and believe [that it too will be conquered]. This
means that Islam will return to Europe as a conqueror and
victor, after being expelled from it twice—once from the
South, from Andalusia, and a second time from the East,
when it knocked several times on the door of Athens.”

When the slaughter and pillage was finished, Mehmet II ordered an
Islamic scholar to mount the high pulpit of the Hagia Sophia and de-
clare that there was no God but Allah, and Muhammad was his proph-
et. The magnificent old church was turned into a mosque; hundreds
of other churches in Constantinople and elsewhere suffered the same
fate. Millions of Christians joined the ranks of the dimmus; others were
enslaved, and many were killed. Mehmet went from the great cathe-
dral-turned-mosque to the Sacred Palace, which had been considerably
damaged and looted. As he walked through the ruined building, he re-
cited a line from a Persian poem: “The spider weaves the curtains in the
palace of the Caesars; the owl calls the watches in Afrasiab’s towers.”**
While the conquered city was still smoldering, Mehmet turned his
mind away from war and looked for some relaxation. He sent a eunuch
to the home of Lukas Notaras’ home, demanding that the megadux send
him his fourteen-year-old son, renowned for his appearance, for the
Sultan’s delectation. Notaras refused, whereupon the sultan, his evening
spoiled, furiously ordered the boy killed, along with his brother-in-law
and father. Notaras asked that the two young men be killed first, so that

200 THe Hisrory of Jinan: From MuywamMan To ISIS

they wouldn't lose heart seeing him killed and give in to the sultan’s
immoral desires. Mehmet obliged him. Once all three were beheaded,
Mehmet ordered that their heads be placed on his banquet table.»

Jihad causes the Renaissance

One consequence of the fall of Constantinople was the emigration of
Greek intellectuals to Western Europe. Muslim territorial expansion at
Byzantine expense led so many Greeks to seek refuge in the West that
Western universities became filled with Platonists and Aristotelians to
an unprecedented extent. This led to the rediscovery of classical philos-
ophy and literature and to an intellectual and cultural flowering the like
of which the world had never seen (and still hasn't).

The Jihad in Eastern Europe

If the jihadis had had their way, however, those Greek refugees would
not have been safe even in their new homes. Once Constantinople and
the Byzantine Empire had fallen, the jihadis turned their sights again to
the rest of Europe. First Mehmet cleared Asia Minor of any resistance
to his rule. When his own mother, a Syrian Christian slave, pleaded with
him not to attack the city of Trebizond, which had become a center of
opposition to the Ottomans, Mehmet replied: “Mother, the sword of
Islam is in my hand.”

The rulers of Europe knew this. Even though it had been a very
long time coming, the fall of Constantinople was a profound shock to
Western Europe. There were immediate calls for a new Crusade to wrest
the great city from the warriors of jihad. In 1455, the new pope, Calixtus
III, took a solemn oath at his consecration:

I, Pope Calixtus III, promise and vow to the Holy Trinity,
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, to the Ever-Virgin Mother
of God, to the Holy Apostles Peter and Paul, and to all the
heavenly host, that I will do everything in my power, even if
need be with the sacrifice of my life, aided by the counsel of
my worthy brethren, to reconquer Constantinople, which in

CHAPTER S1Ix 201

punishment for the sin of man has been taken and ruined
by Mahomet II, the son of the devil and the enemy of our
Crucified Redeemer.

Further, I vow to deliver the Christians languishing
in slavery, to exalt the true Faith, and to extirpate the dia-
bolical sect of the reprobate and faithless Mahomet in the
Fast. For there the light of faith is almost completely ex-
tinguished. If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand
be forgotten. Let my tongue cleave to my jaws, if I do not
remember thee. If I make not Jerusalem the beginning of
my joy, God and His holy Gospel help me. Amen.°”

A Crusader force assembled and defeated the jihadis at Belgrade in 1456,
but that was as far as it was able to get. Constantinople was security in
the hands of Islam, and the warriors of jihad were advancing. In 1461,
Mehmet brought the sword of Islam against the Wallachian prince Vlad
Dracula, whose surname meant “son of the dragon,” after his father, who
was known as The Dragon, or Dracul.

At one point, Dracula’s forces invaded Ottoman territory and
then retreated; when Mehmet’s forces entered the area in Targoviste in
modern-day Romania, they encountered the horrifying sight of twenty
thousand corpses impaled on stakes, Vlad Dracula’s favorite method of
execution—which earned him the name Vlad the Impaler. Mehmet, ap-
palled, pursued Dracula and finally drove him into exile; upon this victo-
ry, Mehmet’s commanders presented him with the gift of two thousand
heads of Dracula's men.*®

The jihads proceeded on to Bosnia. King Stephen of Bosnia wrote
to Pope Pius II that the sultan’s “insatiable thirst for domination knows
no limits.” Mehmet, said Stephen, wanted not just Bosnia but Hun-
gary and Venice, adding, “He also speaks frequently of Rome, which
he dreams of attaining.”’ The renowned warrior Skanderbeg held out
fiercely in Albania, such that when he died in 1467, Mehmet exulted:
“At last Europe and Asia belong to me! Unhappy Christianity. It has lost
both its sword and its buckler.”®

Mehmet’s joy was a trifle premature. Venice fought fiercely against
the Ottomans and dashed the sultan’s hopes of jihad conquest of Europe.

202 Tur Hisrory oF Jinap: From Munammapb To ISIS

He never got an opportunity to besiege Rome. But the warriors of jihad
were patient.

Before he died in 1481, only forty-nine years old, Mehmet enacted
a law designed to ensure the ongoing stability of his domains: “For the
welfare of the state, the one of my sons to whom God grants the Sul-
tanate may lawfully put his brothers to death. This has the approval of a

majority of jurists.”

Il. DHIMMI OPPRESSION IN EGYPT
AND NORTH AFRICA

Egypt was outside Ottoman domains during this period, ruled by the
Mamluks, a class of slave warriors, from around 1250. The Mamluks were
determined to reassert the humiliations of the d4zmma over the non-Mus-
lims in their domains. The fourteenth-century Muslim historian Ibn
Naqgqash recorded that in 1301, the vizier of Gharb in North Africa un-
dertook the pilgrimage to Mecca, and on his way stopped in Cairo to visit
the Mamluk sultan al-Malik an-Nasir and several other high dignitaries,
including the emir Rukn ad-Din Baybar al-Jashangir, “who offered him
magnificent presents and received him with the greatest distinction.””

But amid all the pleasantness of the visit, the vizier had a complaint.
He was not happy with what he had seen in Egypt, where the dhimmi
Jews and Christians were “attired in the most elegant clothes” and “rode
on mules, mares, and expensive horses.”*? Even worse, they were “con-
sidered worthy of being employed in the most important offices, thus
gaining authority over the Muslims.”™

In Gharb, by contrast, the Jews and Christians were “maintained with
constraints of humiliation and degradation. Thus they were not permitted
to ride on horseback, nor to be employed in the public administration.”®

The emir Rukn and several others were impressed, and “unanimous-
ly declared,” according to Ibn Naqgqash, “that if similar conditions were
to prevail in Egypt this would greatly enhance the [Muslim] religion.
Consequently, they assembled the Christians and Jews on Thursday, 20
Rajab, and informed them that they would no longer be employed either
in the public administration or in the service of the emirs. They were to

CHarrer Six 203

change their turbans: blue ones for the Christians, who were moreover
to wear a special belt (zwnnar] around their waists; and yellow turbans
for the Jews.”

The Jewish and Christian leaders appealed and even offered sub-
stantial sums for the rescinding of these new decrees, but to no avail.
And there was more. Ibn Naqqash continued: “The churches of Misr
[old Cairo] and Cairo were closed and their portals were sealed after
having been nailed up.”*’ The new rules were swiftly enforced: “By the
twenty-second of Rajab all the Jews were wearing yellow turbans and the
Christians blue ones; and if they rode on horseback, they were obliged
to ride with one of their legs bent under them. Next, the dhimmis were
dismissed from the public administration and the functions that they
occupied in the service of the emirs. They were then prohibited to ride
horses or mules. Consequently, many of them were converted to Islam.”

The sultan extended some of these rules to all of his domains. Ac-
cording to Ibn Naqqash, “The Sultan gave orders to all the provinces
recently added to his states and in which there were houses owned by
Jews and Christians, in order that all those that were higher than the
surrounding Muslim abodes should be demolished to their height. Fur-
thermore all the d4immis who owned a shop near that of a Muslim,
should lower their mastaba [ground floor] so that those of the Muslims
would be higher. Moreover, he recommended vigilance in the observance
of the distinctive badges [gAzyar] in accordance with ancient custom.”*”

As time went by, however, these laws were once again relaxed, as
the complex realities of human relationships were always in tension with
the cold statute. But since they were part of Islamic law, they could be
reasserted more easily than they could be relaxed. In 1419, the Egyp-
tian Mamluk sultan Malik Safyad-din summoned the Coptic pope
Gabriel V to his presence. “While remaining standing,” recounted the
fifteenth-century Muslim historian [bn Taghribirdi, Gabriel “received
reproaches and blows and was berated by the sultan on account of the
humiliations to which the Muslims had been subjected by the prince of
the Abyssinians,” although it was wildly implausible that a subjugated
people would have dared to subject their overlords to such treatment.
Nonetheless, Gabriel was “even threatened with death.”

204 THe History OF JIHAD: From MunamMan To ISIS

The real problem was that the Christians were no longer observing
the dhimmi restrictions. Malik summoned the chief of the Cairo police
and reprimanded him for the “contempt” the Christians had toward the
laws requiring that they wear distinctive dress. But attire was the least of
the Christians’ problems. [bn Taghribirdi continued:

After a long discussion between the doctors of the Law
and the sultan on this subject, it was decided that none of
these infidels would be employed in government offices,
nor by the emirs; neither would they escape the measures
taken to maintain them in a state of humiliation. There-
upon the sultan summoned Al-Akram Fada’il, the Chris-
tian, the vizier’s secretary, who had been imprisoned for
several days; he was beaten, stripped of his clothes, and
ignominiously paraded through the streets of Cairo in the
company of the chief of police, who proclaimed, “This is
the reward for Christians employed in government of-
fices!” After all this, he was thrown back into prison.

So thoroughly did the sultan carry out these measures,
that nowhere in Egypt was a Christian to be found em-
ployed in the administration. These infidels, as well as the
Jews, were obliged to remain at home, decrease the volume
of their turbans, and shorten their sleeves. Al were prevent-
ed from riding on donkeys, with the result that when the
{common] people saw a mounted Christian, they attacked
him and confiscated his donkey and all that he had....

Thus the edict issued by this prince is tantamount to a
second conquest of Egypt; in this manner was Islam exalted

and infidelity humiliated, and nothing is more praiseworthy
in the eyes of Allah.”

The humiliation was most vividly enforced during the payment of the
jizya. In the latter half of the fifteenth century, the Berber Islamic schol-
ar Muhammad al-Maghili, who was responsible for the expulsion of the
Jews from the city of Tlemcen and the destruction of the synagogue there,
reiterated the manner in which the dhimmis were to make their payments:

CHAPTER Six 205

On the day of payment they shall be assembled in a public
place like the sug. They should be standing there waiting in
the lowest and dirtiest place. The acting officials represent-
ing the Law shall be placed above them and shall adopt a
threatening attitude so that it seems to them, as well as to
the others, that our object is to degrade them by pretending
to take their possessions. They will realize that we are doing
them a favor [again] in accepting from them the jizya and
letting them [thus] go free. Then they shall be dragged one
by one [to the official responsible] for the exacting of pay-
ment. When paying, the ¢himmi will receive a blow and will
be thrust aside so that he will think that he has escaped the
sword through this [insult]. This is the way that the friends
of the Lord, of the first and last generations will act toward
their infidel enemies, for might belongs to Allah, to His
Prophet, and to the Believers.”

Thus it was throughout history in the various Islamic domains: periods
of relaxation of the dhimmi laws would be followed by periods of their
reassertion, often in the context of revivalist movements that blamed the
troubles of the Muslims on the prosperity of the d/immis, and on Allah's
anger that they had not been put in their place.

Ii. THE RAVAGING OF INDIA

Despoiling India for the Abbasids

By the dawn of the fourteenth century, the warriors of jihad had man-
aged to destroy virtually all of the renowned Hindu temples within their
domains in India and had plundered the treasures of those temples for
their own personal enrichment and the endowment of the mosques they
constructed.” Taxes were high and raids frequent. Consequently, the
Muslim rulers of India had at their disposal almost unimaginable wealth.
In 1343, therefore, when the Delhi sultan Muhammad ibn Tughlaq at-
tempted to shore up the legitimacy of his rule by attaching it to the

206 THe History of Jiuap: From MunamMaD TO ISIS

authority of the Abbasid caliphate—even though by this time the Ab-
basid caliph al-Hakim was almost powerless, exiled from Baghdad, and
residing in virtual impotence in Cairo—he was able to send al-Hakim
extraordinary gifts. The Muslim court historian Ziyauddin Barani re-
marked drily: “So great was the faith of the Sultan in the Abbasid Khali-
fas that he would have sent all his treasures in Delhi to Egypt, had it not
been for the fear of robbers.””

When an emissary of the Abbasids visited Delhi, Muhammad ibn
Tughlag showered him with gifts as well, including a million tankahs,
which was equivalent to four hundred thousand dinars, as well as land,
gold, silver, sex slaves, and robes that had in place of buttons “pearls as
large as big hazel nuts.””* The emissary was able to witness the brutal ef-
ficiency of the Delhi sultan’s rule, for executions were carried out right in
front of the palace, and were so frequent that the entrances to the palaces
were often blocked by corpses.”

Muhammad ibn Tughlag amassed all of this wealth at the expense of
his Hindu subjects. At one point, recounts a contemporary historian, Mu-
hammad ibn Tughlag “led forth his army to ravage Hindostan. He laid the
country waste from Kanauj to Dalmau [on the Ganges, in the Rai Baréli
District, Oudh], and every person that fell into his hands he slew. Many of
the inhabitants fled and took refuge in the jungles, but the Sultan had the
jungles surrounded, and every individual that was captured was killed.”

Muhammad's successor, Firuz Shah Tughlaq, exulted that “the
greatest and best of honours that I obtained through God’s mercy was,
that by my obedience and piety, and friendliness and submission to the
Khalifa, the representative of the holy Prophet, my authority was con-
firmed, for it is by his {the caliph’s] sanction that the power of the kings
is assured, and no king is secure until he has submitted himself to the
Khalifa, and has received a confirmation from the sacred throne.””’

Bringing Islam to the Hindus

Secure in this legitimacy, Firuz Shah Tughlaq resumed the jihad against
the Hindus, targeting in 1360 one of the few remaining grand Hindu
temples, the temple of Jagannath at Puri in southeastern India. Accord-
ing to Barani's Tartkh-e Firuz Shahi (History of Firuz Shah):

CHAPTER SIx 207

Allah who is the only true God and has no other emanation,
endowed the king of Islam with the strength to destroy this
ancient shrine on the eastern sea-coast and to plunge it into
he sea, and after its destruction he [Firuz Shah] ordered
the image of Jagannath to be perforated, and disgraced it
by casting it down on the ground. They dug out other idols
which were worshipped by the polytheists in the kingdom
of Jajnagar and overthrew them as they did the image of
Jagannath, for being laid in front of the mosques along the
path of the Sunnis and the way of the musa/fis [Muslim
congregation for namaz (prayers)] and stretched them in
front of the portals of every mosque, so that the body and
sides of the images might be trampled at the time of ascent

and descent, entrance and exit, by the shoes on the feet of
the Muslims.”

The jihadis were merciless. After this, Barani recounted, they proceeded
to a nearby island, where “nearly 100,000 men of Jajnagar had taken ref-
uge with their women, children, kinsmen and relations.” But the Mus-
lims transformed “the island into a basin of blood by the massacre of the
unbelievers.... Women with babies and pregnant ladies were haltered,
manacled, fettered and enchained, and pressed as slaves into service at
the house of every soldier.”*° At Nagarkot, Firuz Shah Tughlaq “broke
the idols of Jvalamukhi, mixed their fragments with the flesh of cows and
hung them in nosebags round the necks of the Brahmins. He sent the
principal idol as trophy to Medina.”®

Firuz Shah, said Barani, “made the laws of the Prophet his guide.
Accordingly, when the sultan discovered that Hindus were not passively
accepting the destruction of their temples, but were building new ones,
he was enraged. “Under divine guidance,” he recalled later, “I destroyed
these edifices, and I killed those leaders of infidelity who seduced others
into error, and the lower orders I subjected to stripes and chastisement,
until this abuse was entirely abolished.”*? At Kohana, he had some Hin-
dus who had dared to construct a new temple executed in public, “as a
warning that no zim could follow such wicked practices in a Musal-
man country.”* He treated a Hindu sect with similar harshness: “I cut

22

208 Tar History or Jinap: From MunbamMAD TO JSIS

off the heads of the elders of this sect, and imprisoned and banished
the rest, so that their abominable practices were put an end to,”* After
discovering that the Brahmins had been exempted from paying the jizya
by previous Muslim rulers, he commanded that they pay, and held firm
even through a Brahmin hunger strike.

At Maluh, near Delhi, he discovered that even some “graceless” Mus-
lims were attending a Hindu religious festival. “I ordered that the leaders of
these people and the promoters of this abomination should be put to death.
J forbade the infliction of any severe punishment on the Hindus in general,
but I destroyed their idol temples and instead thereof raised mosques.”

Firuz Shah was likewise zealous for Sunni Islam, recounting that
“the sect of Shias, also called Rawdfiz, had endeavoured to make pros-
elytes.”*® The Delhi sultan began a jihad against them: “I seized them
all and I convicted them of their errors and perversions. On the most
zealous I inflicted capital punishment [siyasa¢], and the rest I visited
with censure [¢@zir], and threats of public punishment. Their books |
burnt in public and by the grace of God the influence of this sect was
entirely suppressed.”*? Upon discovering that a Muslim was claiming to
be the Mahdi, he demanded that the “doctors learned in the holy Law”
kill him forthwith; they complied. “For this good action,” said Firuz
Shah piously, “I hope to receive future reward.””

Under the pressure of the relentless persecution they suffered, many
Hindus converted to Islam, as Firuz Shah later recalled with satisfaction:
“T encouraged my infidel subjects to embrace the religion of the prophet,
and I proclaimed that every one who repeated the creed and became a
Musalman should be exempt from the jizya or poll-tax. Information of
this came to the ears of the people at large, and great numbers of Hindus
presented themselves, and were admitted to the honour of Islam. Thus
they came forward day by day from every quarter, and, adopting the
faith, were exonerated from the jizya, and were favoured with presents
and honours.””!

Meanwhile, there was no mercy to be accorded to the captive peo-
ple. In 1391, the Muslims of Gujarat complained to Muhammad Shah,
the son and second successor of Firuz Shah as Tughlaq sultan of Delhi,
about a local governor. His crime? Being too lenient with the Hindus.
Muhammad Shah immediately removed the wayward governor from

CHAPTER S1x 209

office and replaced him with Muzaffar Khan, a man who was less like-
ly to be pliant.” According to the Taégat i-Akbari, a sixteenth-century
history of India written by the Muslim historian Nizamuddin Ahmed,
the Hindus of the Kingdom of Idar began a full-scale revolt, whereupon
“the armies of Zafar Khan occupied the Kingdom of Idar and started
plundering and destroying it. They levelled with the ground whatever
temple they found.””? Pursuing the fleeing Raja of Idar to the fortress
of Bijanagar, “in the morning Zafar Khan entered the fort and, after
expressing his gratefulness to Allah, and destroying the temples, he ap-
pointed officers in the fort.”

Anointing himself Muzaffar Shah, Sultan of Gujarat, independent
of the Tughlags in Delhi, he proceeded to Somnath in 1395, where the
Hindus had rebuilt the temple that Muslims had previously destroyed.”
“On the way,” according to the Taégat i-Akbari, “he made Rajputs food
for his sword and demolished whatever temple he saw at any place.
When he arrived at Somnat, he got the temple burnt and the idol of
Somnat broken. He made a slaughter of the infidels and laid waste the
city.”*° Enraged at what he called the “impudence” of the Hindus, he
killed many of them, had a mosque built on the site of the temple, and
appointed officials to enforce the Sharia.”

In 1401, when the Hindus had the temerity to build a temple there
again, he returned and once again tore down the temple and had a mosque
built.** Some Hindus resisted; according to Nizamuddin Ahmed, the
Muslim warrior Azam Humayun “reached that place speedily and he
slaughtered that group. Those who survived took shelter in the fort of
the port at Dip [Diu]. After some time, he conquered that place as well,
slaughtered that group also, and got their leaders trampled under the feet
of elephants. He got the temples demolished and a Jami Masjid con-
structed”—that is, the main mosque for the area. “Having appointed a
gazi, mufti and other guardians of Shariah, he returned to the capital.””

Tamerlane in India

Meanwhile, the Mongols had designs upon India as well. In 1398,
Tamerlane, heedless of the authority that the Abbasid caliphs had be-
stowed upon the Tughlags, invaded the Indian subcontinent. His object

210 THE History orf JinApd: FROM MuniAMMAD TO ISIS

was not, at least initially, to challenge the power of the Delhi sultanate.
An erudite man, Tamerlane is unusual among the great Muslim warriors
of jihad in leaving behind an autobiography, In it he made clear, as had
other jihad leaders in India before him, that the invasion was all about
Islam. He quoted the Qur’an: “O Prophet, fight against the disbelievers
and the hypocrites and be harsh upon them.” (9:73) Then he explained
his own motives:

My object in the invasion of Hindustan is to lead a cam-
paign against the infidels, to convert them to the true faith
according to the command of the Prophet (on whom be the
blessing of God!), to purify the land from the defilement of
[misbelief] and polytheism, and overthrow the temples and
idols, whereby we shall be Ghazis [raiders] and Mujahids [ji-
hadis], champions and soldiers of the Faith before God."

Sharaf ad-Din Ali Yazdi, a fifteenth-century Persian who wrote a bi-
ography of Tamerlane, observed that “the Alcoran [Qur’an] says the
highest dignity man can attain is that of making war in person against
the enemies of his religion. Mahomet [Muhammad] advises the same
thing, according to the tradition of the mussulman [Muslim] doctors:
wherefore the great Temur always strove to exterminate the infidels, as
much to acquire that glory, as to signalise himself by the greatness of
his conquests.”?"!

Tamerlane also expressed the hope that “the army of Islam might
gain something by plundering the wealth and valuables of the Hin-
dus.”" At the fortress of Kator on the Kashmir, he recounted with sat-
isfaction, Tamerlane ordered the warriors of jihad to “kill all the men, to
make prisoners of the women and children, and to plunder and lay waste
all their property.”’” Then he “directed towers to be built on the moun-
tain of the skulls of those obstinate unbelievers.”™

At Bhatnir, he “made great slaughter,” as the Qur’an directs (8:67),
at a Rajput fortress. He wrote in his autobiography: “In a short space of
time all the people in the fort were put to the sword, and in the course of
one hour the heads of 10,000 infidels were cut off. The sword of Islam
was washed in the blood of the infidels, and all the goods and effects,
the treasure and the grain which for many a long year had been stored

CHAPTER SIx 211

in the fort became the spoil of my soldiers. They set fire to the houses
and reduced them to ashes, and they razed the buildings and the fort to
the ground,.”'%

Tamerlane clearly relished all of this bloodshed and thought of him-
self as the executor of the wrath of Allah, as commanded in the Qur'an:
“Fight them; Allah will punish them by your hands.” (9:14) At Sarsuti,
he recounted, “all these infidel Hindus were slain, their wives and chil-
dren were made prisoners and their property and their goods became
the spoils of the victors.” At Haryana, he told his men to “plunder and
destroy and kill every one whom they met.”"”” The jihadis obeyed; they
“plundered every village, killed the men, and carried a number of Hindu
prisoners, both male and female.”"* At Delhi, the warriors of jihad took
some Muslim prisoners, which was understandable, since the city was
the capital of the Tughlaq’s Delhi sultanate.

Tamerlane commanded that the Muslim prisoners “should be sepa-
rated and saved, but the infidels should all be dispatched to hell with the
proselytizing sword,.”!”

Even when those prisoners had been killed, however, the immense
success of Tamerlane’s jihad presented him with a problem: he had a
hundred thousand Hindu prisoners. As he prepared to face an army of
the Tughlags in an internecine jihad battle, his advisors told him “that on
the great day of battle these 100,000 prisoners could not be left with the
baggage, and that it would be entirely opposed to the rules of war to set
these idolaters and enemies of Islam at liberty.”"”° Thus, “no other course
remained but that of making them all food for the sword.”""’
recalls: “I proclaimed throughout the camp that every man who had in-
fidel prisoners should put them to death, and whoever neglected to do

Tamerlane

so should himself be executed and his property given to the informer.
When this order became known to the ghazis of Islam, they drew their
swords and put their prisoners to death. One hundred thousand infidels,
impious idolaters, were on that day slain. Maulana Nasiruddin Umar, a
counselor and man of learning who, in all his life, had never killed a spar-
row, now, in execution of my order, slew with his sword fifteen idolatrous
Hindus, who were his captives.”"”

Tamerlane’s warriors defeated the Tughlaqs and found in Delhi that

“a great number of Hindus with their wives and children, and goods and

p aly, THe History of Jinan: From MuuamMaApn vo ISIS

valuables, had come into the city from all the country round.”!” He or-
dered them to be taken captive, and their property given to the Muslims.

Many of them [Hindus] drew their swords and resisted....
The flames of strife were thus lighted and spread through
the whole city from Jahanpanah and Siri to Old Delhi,
burning up all it reached. The Hindus set fire to their hous-
es with their own hands, burned their wives and children in
them and rushed into the fight and were killed.... On that
day, Thursday, and all the night of Friday, nearly 15,000
Turks were engaged in slaying, plundering and destroying.
When morning broke on Friday, all my army...went off to
the city and thought of nothing but killing, plundering and
making prisoners.... The following day, Saturday the 17th,
all passed in the same way, and the spoil was so great that
each man secured from fifty to a hundred prisoners, men,
women, and children. There was no man who took less than
twenty. The other booty was immense in rubies, diamonds,
garnets, pearls, and other gems and jewels, ashrafis, tankas
of gold and silver of the celebrated Alai coinage: vessels and
silver ornaments of Hindu women were obtained in such
quantities as to exceed all account. Excepting the quarter of
the Sayids, the ulama and other Musulmans, the whole city
was sacked."

The Jihad Against China

In 1404, Tamerlane resolved to take the jihad to China, even though
he had been warned by one of his envoys who had gone to Beijing that
“the Emperor of China was lord of so many warriors that when his host
went forth to wage war beyond the limits of his Empire, without count-
ing those who marched with him he could leave four hundred thousand
horsemen behind to guard his realm together with numerous regiments
of footguards,”"

Tamerlane was undeterred. On his way to China, he decided to sub-
due for Islam the Kingdom of Georgia, which he had left alone many

CHaprer SIX 213

times as he passed to and from India. His warriors found a way into the
fortress of Kurtin, where, shouting “4//ahu akbar,” they surprised and
overwhelmed the Georgians. Delighted, Tamerlane rewarded these ji-
hadis with gorgeous robes, weapons, horses, land, and a large number of
sex slaves.'"°

As Tamerlane advanced in Georgia, according to a contemporary
chronicler, “he plundered seven hundred towns and villages, laying
waste the cultivated lands, ruining the monasteries of the Christians
and razing the churches to the very foundations.”""” He continued his
destruction of churches and the countryside, killing so many people
that the piles of skulls became the tallest feature of the landscape.
When the king of Georgia agreed to pay the jizya, however, it was
time to move on to China.""®

Tamerlane’s biographer Yazdi compared the advance of the jihadis
to the progress of medicine in the human body.

In the same manner, God, who was pleased to purge the
world, made use of a medicine which was both sweet and
bittez, to wit the clemency and the wrath of the incompa-
rable Temur; and to that effect inspired in him an ambition
to conquer all Asia and to expel the several tyrants thereof.
He established peace and security in this part of the world
so that a single man might carry a silver basin filled with
gold from the east of Asia to the west. But yet he could
not accomplish this great affair without bringing in some
measure upon the places he conquered destruction, captiv-
ity and plunder, which are the concomitants of victory.'”

Tamerlane’s desire for cleansing destruction, captivity, and plunder was
stymied by the savage Central Asian winter, which was so severe, said
Yazdi, that “several men and horses perished in the road, some losing
their hands and feet, others their ears and noses.”’”” The ground was
blanketed with snow so thick that the warriors of jihad made their way
only with great difficulty. But Tamerlane was undeterred. The march to
China would continue.

The Muslim historian Ahmed ibn Arabshah, a contemporary of
Tamerlane, noted the warlord’s determination not to let the weather

214 THe History or Jinan: From MuwamMaApD To ISIS

stop him. But the onslaught was relentless, “But winter dealt damage
to him, breaking on him from the flanks with every wind kindled and
raging against his army with all winds blowing aslant, most violent, and
smote the shoot of the army with its intense cold.”!’

Still Tamerlane would not call off the march, even as the warriors of
jihad began to succumb to the inhuman conditions. “On all sides,” said
Arabshah with a fine poetic flair, “with the snow that fell from above the
whole earth became like the plain of the last judgment or a sea which
God forged out of silver. When the sun rose and the frost glittered, the
sight was wonderful, the sky of Turkish gems and the earth of crystal,
specks of gold filling the space between.”

Beautiful, but deadly. By the middle of January 1405, the jihadis had
gotten only as far as Otrar in Kazakhstan. Everywhere the snow was so
deep as to be impassible. Soon the great warrior, by now sixty-eight years
old, caught a cold. His condition rapidly worsened, no doubt in part
because one of the treatments tried on him involved covering his chest
with ice. He asked those attending him to say “A//ahu akbar” and recite
the Fatiha, the first chapter of the Qur'an, to comfort him. Before long,
he was dead. China was saved from the sword of jihad by the deep snow,
the bitter cold, and the freezing wind.

India: The Long Persecution

The jihad in India found more favorable weather. In 1414, the Guja-
rat sultan Ahmed Shah appointed an official whose sole task was to
ensure the destruction of all the temples in Gujarat. The following
year, he invaded Sidhpur and converted the temple at Rudramahalaya
into a mosque.'** In 1419, according to the Tabgat i-Akbari, Ahmed
Shah “encamped near Champaner” and “destroyed temples wherever
he found them.”'

Muslim rulers in other parts of India behaved in the same way.
Sultan Mahmud Khalji of the Marwa sultanate in central India, who
reigned in the middle of the fifteenth century, once approached a fort
near Kumbhalmir that was, said Nizamuddin Ahmed, “a very big fort of
that province, and well-known for its strength all over Hindustan.” The
Muslims quickly saw that “a magnificent temple had been erected in

CHAPTER S1x 215

front of that fort and surrounded by ramparts on all sides, That temple
had been filled with weapons of war and other stores,”"5

The Muslims were victorious, whereupon “a large number of Ra-
jputs were made prisoners and slaughtered. About the edifices of the
temple, he ordered that they should be stocked with wood and fired, and
water and vinegar was sprinkled on the walls. That magnificent mansion
which it had taken many years to raise, was destroyed in a few moments.
He got the idols broken and they were handed over to the butchers for
being used as weights while selling meat. The biggest idol which had the
form of a ram was reduced to powder which was put in betel-leaves to be
given to the Rajputs so that they could eat their god.”'

At Mandalgadh in 1456, Mahmud Khalji “issued orders that trees
should be uprooted, houses demolished and no trace should be left of
human habitation.” When the Muslims defeated the Hindus, “Sultan
Mahmud offered thanks to Allah in all humility. Next day, he entered
the fort. He got the temples demolished and their materials used in the
construction of a Jami Masjid. He appointed there a qazi, a mufti, a
muhtasib, a khatib and a muezzin, and established order in that place.”
He also led jihadi warriors into Nepal, where they destroyed the temple
of Svayambhunath in Katmandu."

Islamic piety always underlay the jihad. A Hindu ruler, the Man-
dahika of Junagadh, was paying tribute to the Gujarat sultan Mahmud
Bigarha, but in 1469 Mahmud invaded Junagadh anyway. ‘The Man-
dalika, dismayed, reminded the sultan that he had always been prompt
and regular with his payments. Mahmud was unmoved, explaining to
the Mandalika that he wasn’t interested in money as much as he was
in spreading Islam. He forced the Mandalika to convert and renamed
Junagadh Mustafabad.'?? Mahmud also offered conversion to the Hindu
ruler of Champaner, Raja Jayasingh, but Raja refused and was duly mur-
dered. Mahmud renamed Champaner after himself, Mahmudabad,’°°

The Bahmani sultan Muhammad Shah was just as pious. The six-
teenth-century Persian historian Firishta recounted that at Kondapalli
in 1481, “the King, having gone to view the fort, broke down an idol-
atrous temple and killed some brahmans who officiated at it, with his
own hands, as a point of religion. He then gave orders for a mosque to
be erected on the foundations of the temple, and ascending the pulpit,

216 Terr History of Jinap: From MunwamMMaD To ISIS

repeated a few prayers, distributed alms, and commanded the Khutba
[Friday sermon] to be read in his name. Khwaja Mahmud Gawan now
represented that as his Majesty had slain some infidels with his own
hands, he might fairly assume the title of Ghazi [warrior for Islam], an
appellation of which he was very proud. Muhammad Shah was the first
of his race who had slain a brahman.”"!

At Kondapelli, the jihadis learned that there was still more glory to
be had. Firishta wrote that while he was there, Muhammad Shah was
“informed by the country people that at the distance of ten days’ journey
was the temple of Kanchi, the walls and roof of which were covered
with plates of gold and ornamented with precious stones, but that no
Muhammadan monarch had as yet seen it or even heard of its name.
Muhammad Shah accordingly selected six thousand of his best caval-
ry, and leaving the rest of his army at Kondapalli, proceeded by forced
marches to Kanchi. He moved so rapidly on the last day, according to the
historians of the time, that only forty troopers kept up with him.”’*? Mu-
hammad Shah prevailed over two Hindus in hand-to-hand combat, but
then “swarms of people, like bees, now issued from within and ranged
themselves under its walls to defend it. At length, the rest of the King’s
force coming up, the temple was attacked and carried by storm with
great slaughter. An immense booty fell to the share of the victors, who
took away nothing but gold, jewels, and silver, which were abundant.
The King then [March 12, 1481] sacked the city of Kanchi, and, after
remaining there for a week, he returned to his army.”

Outdoing even Mahmud Bigarha and Muhammad Shah in devo-
tion to Islam was the Delhi sultan Sikandar Lodi, who came to power in
1489. He adhered strictly to Sharia and was consequently extraordinari-
ly antagonistic to Hinduism.’ According to the seventeenth-century
Larikh-i- Khan Jahan Lodt, by the Muslim court historian Niamatullah,
“Sultan Sikandar was yet a young boy when he heard about a tank [pool
of holy water] in Thanesar which the Hindus regarded as sacred and
went for bathing in it. He asked the theologians about the prescription
of the Shariah on this subject. They replied that it was permitted to
demolish the ancient temples and idol-houses of the infidels, but it was
not proper for him to stop them from going to an ancient tank. Hearing

CHAPTER SIX 217

this reply, the prince drew out his sword and thought of beheading the
theologian concerned, saying that he [the theologian] was siding with
the infidels,”!

The sixteenth-century Muslim historian Ahmad Yadgar recount-
ed that “Sultan Sikandar led a very pious life. Istam was regarded very
highly in his reign. The infidels could not muster the courage to worship
idols or bathe in the [sacred] streams. During his holy reign, idols were
hidden underground. The stone [idol] of Nagarkot, which had misled
the [whole] world, was brought and handed over to butchers so that they
might weigh meat with it.”

Another sixteenth-century Muslim historian, Shaikh Rizqullah
Mushtaqi, provided more detail about that stone: “IGhawas Khan... hav-
ing been ordered by the Sultan to march towards Nagarkot, in order to
bring the hill country under subjection, succeeded in conquering it, and
having sacked the infidels temple of Debi Shankar, brought away the
stone which they worshipped, together with a copper umbrella, which
was placed over it, and on which a date was engraved in Hindu charac-
ters, representing it to be two thousand years old. When the stone was
sent to the King, it was given over to the butchers to make weights out
of it for the purpose of weighing meat. From the copper of the umbrella,
several pots were made, in which water might be warmed, and which
were placed in the masjids and the King’s own palace, so that everyone
might wash his hands, feet and face in them and perform his purifica-
tions before prayers.”*’

The jihad in India, and the wholesale destruction of the idols, would
continue into the sixteenth century, courtesy of Sikandar Lodi and a host
of other Muslim leaders.

IV. THE FALL OF AL-ANDALUS

Meanwhile, toward the end of the fifteenth century came the culmi-
nation of what is to date the largest-scale resistance to jihad that has
ever been successfully undertaken. In 1469 King Ferdinand of Ara-
gon married Queen Isabella of Castile. Their combined forces began
to confront the last remaining Islamic strongholds in Spain. In 1492,

4
218 THe Hisrory or Jinan: From MunamMMan to IS]$

after ten years of war, they defeated the Emirate of Granada, the last
bastion of al-Andalus on the Iberian Peninsula. Seven hundred eighty-
one years after Tarig ibn Ziyad’s boats (the gift of the Christian Count
Julian) landed in Spain, with the Muslim commander determined to
take the land or die there, the Christians had fully driven the warriors
of jihad from Spain.

To this day, Spain remains one of the few places once ruled by Islam
but no longer; usually what the jihadis have conquered, they’ve kept.
Because of the Qur’anic command to “drive them out from where they
drove you out” (2:191), Spain remains high on the list of countries that
contemporary jihad groups hope to reconquer for Islam. The Christian
Reconquista may not be the last one Spain ever sees.

Also in 1492, Christopher Columbus sailed west, commissioned
by Ferdinand and Isabella to search for a new, westward sea route to
Asia. He was on this search because the fall of Constantinople to the
Muslims in 1453 effectively closed the trade routes to the East, making
them too hazardous to traverse by non-Muslim tradesmen, who risked
kidnapping, enslavement, and death by doing so. This was devastating
for Europe, as European traders had until then traveled to Asia for
spices and other goods by land. Columbus’ voyage was an attempt to
ease the plight of these merchants by bypassing the Muslims altogether
and making it possible for Europeans to reach India by sea, without
being attacked by jihadis.

He was, of course, to make 2 momentous discovery that would, as
the years sped by, ultimately provide an entirely new field of operations
for the warriors of jihad.

PDF created by Rajesh Arya - Gujarat

CHAPTER SEVEN

THE OTTOMANS AND
MUGHALS IN ASCENDANCE

Jihad in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

I. THE JIHAD IN EUROPE

The Ottomans continued their ascent. The Safavid Persians, who had
just adopted Shi’ism in 1501, were a new and potent force confronting
the Ottoman sultanate in eastern Asia Minor; as the Ottomans grew in
power and confidence, a confrontation was inevitable.

There was, however, one obstacle: the Qur'an forbids Muslims to
kill fellow Muslims (4:92), and so these Shi’a had to be declared non-
Muslim. A decree therefore went out that “according to the precepts of
the holy law,” the Safavid Shah Ismail and his followers were “unbeliev-
ers and heretics. Any who sympathize and accept their false religion or
assist them are also unbelievers and heretics. It is a necessity and a divine
obligation that they be massacred and their communities be dispersed.”

The Ottoman sultan Selim then wrote to Shah Ismail: “You have
subjected the upright community of Muhammad...to your devious will
fand] undermined the firm foundation of the faith; you have unfurled
the banner of oppression in the cause of aggression [and] no longer up-
hold the commandments and prohibitions of the Divine Law; you have
incited your abominable Shii faction to unsanctified sexual union and
the shedding of innocent blood.”

The jihad against the Shiites thus justified, the Ottomans defeated
them in 1514, and drove them from the eastern regions of Asia Minor.

220 THe History oF Jinap: From MuvAMMAD TO ISIS

Two years later, the Ottomans defeated the Mamluks and gained con-
trol of Syria and the Holy Land and defeated them again to win Egypt
shortly thereafter. Their preeminence in the Islamic world, outside of
Persia and India, was now secured, and then cemented in 1517 when the
last Abbasid caliph, al-Mutawakkil III, surrendered his authority to the
Ottoman caliph Selim I.’

Although the Holy Land had been occupied by Muslims since
1291, the Ottoman presence there was alarming to the crowned heads of
Europe, who had long had an opportunity to see the Ottomans up close,
far closer than they would have preferred. Pope Leo X tried to organize a
new Crusade, and in 1518 called upon the leaders of Europe to stop their
infighting and unite against the jihadis, but it was that very infighting
that prevented any concerted European effort against the Ottomans.

The Ottomans even became a rhetorical weapon in that infighting.
In response to Pope Leo X’s efforts toward a new Crusade, the pioneer-
ing reformer Martin Luther declared that “to fight against the Turk is
the same thing as resisting God, who visits our sin upon us with this
rod.”* In polemicizing against the Roman Church, Luther even charged
that the papacy was worse than the Ottoman caliphate, thus making a
Crusade against the Ottomans in alliance with the pope anathema to
many Protestants:

The Pope, with his followers, commits a greater sin than
the Turk and all the Heathen.... The Turk forces no one
to deny Christ and to adhere to his faith.... Though
he rages most intensely by murdering Christians in the
body—he, after all, does nothing by this but fill heaven
with saints.... The Pope does not want to be either enemy
or Turk.... He fills hell with nothing but “Christians”...
This is committing real spiritual murder and is every bit
as bad as the teaching and blasphemy of Mohammed and
the Turks. But whenever men do not allow him to practice
this infernal diabolical seduction—he adopts the way of
the Turk, and commits bodily murder too.... The Turk is
an avowed enemy of Christ. But the Pope is not. He is a
secret enemy and persecutor, a false friend. For this reason,
he is all the worse!>

CRAPTER SEVEN pal iil

Luther's broadside was one of the earliest examples of what was to be-
come a near-universal tendency in the West: the downplaying of jihad
atrocities and their use in arguments between Westerners to make one
side look worse.

No Crusade was forthcoming. And so, with their rivals defeated or
at bay, the now undisputed Ottoman caliphate could turn its attention
once again to Europe. The janissaries were the spearhead of this new ji-
had effort. As converted Christians, they were more trustworthy as slaves
of the sultan than Muslims would have been, as it was widely believed
that the Muslims would use their position to favor their relatives and
home regions.

But the janissaries, cut off from their families and homelands,
aroused no such concerns. A contemporary observer explained: “If
Christian children accept Islam, they become zealous in the faith and
enemies of their relatives.” This was so widely accepted as axiomatic
that a Christian visitor, Baron Wenceslas Wradislaw, noted: “Never...
did I hear it said of any pasha, or observe either in Constantinople or in
the whole land of Turkey, that any pasha was a natural born Turk; on the
contrary, kidnapped, or captured, or turned Turk.”’

Commanding this force of zealous converts from 1520 to 1566 was
the sultan who came to be known as Suleiman the Magnificent, who
took the Ottoman caliphate to the height of its power. His jihadis de-
feated the Knights Hospitallers of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem,
whom the Ottornans regarded (in the words of an official of the sultan-
ate) as “professional cutthroats and pirates,” taking the island of Rhodes
after a 145-day siege in 1522.°

Ottoman power over the castern Mediterranean was near total, with
only Cyprus and Crete remaining outside the dornains of the caliphate.
But the Ottomans generally neglected Rhodes, to the degree that the
Venetian envoy Pietro Zeno asserted the year after its conquest that “the
Sultan has no use for Rhodes.”’ Zeno may not have realized that the Ot-
tomans had not taken Rhodes to put it to any particular use, but simply
because the jihad imperative was universal and absolute.

In 1526, the sultan ordered his jihad warriors to take Vienna. The
armies were under the supervision of Ibrahim Pasha, Suleiman’s grand
vizier, a Greek Christian who had been captured, enslaved, and con-

222 The History or Jinap: From Munamman vo ISIS

verted to Islam as a boy, and who had then risen high in the Ottoman
court after befriending Suleiman. When the jihadis arrived at Belgrade
on their way to Austria, Suleiman ordered Ibrahim to take it, recounting
later in his diary that he told him “it will be but a bite to last him till
breakfast at Vienna.”!° Once Belgrade was taken, Suleiman noted with
satisfaction that “the Grand Vezir has 500 soldiers of the garrison be-
headed; 300 others are taken away into slavery."

The jihadis moved into Hungary, where they soundly defeated a
massive Hungarian force at Mohacs. On August 31, 1526, Suleiman re-
corded in his diary, speaking of himself in the third person: “The Sultan,
seated on a golden throne, receives the homage of the viziers and the
beys; massacre of 2,000 prisoners; the rain falls in torrents.”’* He ordered
Mohacs to be burned. Its site came to be known among Hungarians as
“the tomb of the Hungarian nation.”*

Four days later, the jihadis took Buda. Suleiman recorded the de-
tails: “Sept. 4. Order to massacre all peasants in the camp. Women alone
exempted, Akinjis forbidden to plunder.” The a&injis were the Otto-
man cavalry and advance troops. They ignored the antiplunder order,
and Suleiman did not punish them for doing so. The jihadis burned
Buda and seized the treasures of its renowned library and much of its
great art, including statues of Hercules, Diana, and Apollo, for ship-
ment back to Constantinople.’® Suleiman took the most satisfaction
in seizing two immense cannons that Mehmet II was forced to leave
behind after one of his campaigns. The Hungarians had put them on
display as trophies signifying their defeat of the Ottomans; there was to
be no more of that.’

Suleiman lingered awhile in Hungary, but unexpectedly, he did not
make it part of the Ottoman Empire. The historian Kemal Pasha Zadeh,
a contemporary of Suleiman, wrote: “The time when this province should
be annexed to the possession of Islam had not yet arrived.... The matter
was therefore postponed to a more suitable occasion.”® He instead chose
the next Hungarian king, John Zapolya, and made him his vassal.

Apparently, the sultan did not think that the territory could be held
securely or governed effectively from Constantinople at that time, and
this was reinforced when he set out again in May 1529 and his armies,
stymied by heavy rains, took almost four months to return to Buda."

CHAPTER SEVEN 223

Once there, Suleiman crowned his vassal Hungarian king and em-
barked for Vienna. When they arrived in September 1529, the Muslims
plundered and set fire to the villages surrounding the city, and then laid
siege to the city itself.

This time Luther green-lighted the defense of Christendom against
the Turks, and a combined force of Catholics and Protestants, some of
whom had just arrived three days before the Ottomans, were inside Vi-
enna ready to defend it against the jihadi onslaught. The bad weather
forced Suleiman to leave behind some of his key equipment at Buda, and
this hampered the assault by the Muslims, yet they still had a consider-
able force to throw at the city, and they did.

The Christians held firm. Suleiman abandoned the siege in mid-
October, burning to death all of his prisoners except those who would
be useful as slaves, and set out for Constantinople. Back at Buda, John
Zapolya savished flattery upon his master, congratulating Suleiman for
his “successful campaign.””°

Suleiman tried again in 1532 to take Vienna but wasn’t even able to
get into Austria; Archduke Ferdinand of Austria stopped the jihadis in
Hungary. However, the sultan did not forget Vienna.

He had better luck against the Shi'ite Safavids, from whom he
took Baghdad in 1534. On a fortress in Bessarabia (modern-day Mol-
dova), Suleiman inscribed a boast proclaiming himself the master of
the Safavids, Byzantines, and Mamluks: “In Baghdad I am the shah, in
Byzantine realms the Caesar, and in Egypt the sultan.””’ The Safavids
and Mamluks were not entirely subdued, but he had beaten them both
enough to give substance to the boast. Egypt became a valued source for
slaves captured from sub-Saharan Africa: at the Turkish port of Antalya,
a customs official in 1559 noted the arrival of cargo from Egypt, among
which “black slaves, both male and female, constituted the bulk of the
traffic. Many ships carried slaves exclusively.””

Mindful of his Islamic responsibility, Suleiman oversaw extensive
renovations at Mecca, ensuring a pure water supply for pilgrims and
opening schools of Islamic theology. In Jerusalem, he had the Dome of
the Rock redecorated in the Ottoman style. He was careful always to
keep the dhimmis in their place. In 1548, the French ambassador to the
Ottoman Empire, M. d’Aramon, visited the Holy Land and reported:

224 THe History or Jinap: From Munammap To IS18$

“Jerusalem has been enclosed by city walls built by the Turks, but there
are neither ramparts nor a ditch. The town is medium-sized and not
much populated, the streets are narrow and unpaved.... The so-called
temple of Solomon is at the base of the city..,round and with a lead-
covered dome; around its core are chapels as in our churches, which 1s
all one can surmise because no Christian is permitted to enter the area
without threat of death or having to become a [Muslim].””

As he grew older, Suleiman’s zealousness for jihad waned, His cam-
paigns against Christian Europe became a distant memory. For some of
those around him, this was an indictment. In 1566, when Suleiman was
seventy-one years old and had not led an expedition into Europe for
twenty-three years, his daughter Mihrimah Sultan reproached the caliph
for neglecting his Islamic obligation to lead the armies of Islam in jihad
warfare against non-Muslims.”

Suleiman was stung by the criticism, particularly from a woman,
and found no better retort than to get back on his horse. Several months
later, outside the fortress of Szigetvar in Hungary, which the jihadis were
besieging, the old warrior died in his tent.*° To avoid demoralizing the
troops, his death was not announced for forty-eight days, a page who
slightly resembled him was dressed in his clothes and carried in his litter
on the journey home, but most onlookers saw through the ruse.”°

The real Suleiman’s heart, liver, and some other organs were buried
in a tomb there that became a popular pilgrimage site for Ottoman Mus-
lims; the rest of his remains were taken back to Constantinople—which
the Ottomans often referred to as Istanbul (“to the city” in Greek) or,
using the Turkish cognate, Konstantiniyye—and buried there.”’

Russia and a Canal

Suleiman’s successor as sultan and caliph, Selim II, immediately faced
new challenges. In 1552, the Russian czar Ivan the Terrible annexed
the Central Asian Tatar khanate of Kazan; in 1556 he likewise incor-
porated the Astrakhan khanate into his domains. A large number of
Muslims came under Russian rule. In 1567, he built a fort on the River
Terek in the Caucasus, Muslims in the area appealed to Selim for help,
claiming that because the Russians controlled Astrakhan, they could not

CHAPTER SEVEN 225

safely make the pilgrimage to Mecca, as the route now required they
pass through Russian domains.”* In 1571, the Tatars raided Moscow, yet
failed to repeat that victory the following year, and had to give up hope
of reconquering the area.”

Searching for a way to enable the Muslims of the Caucasus and
Central Asia to make the pilgrimage to Mecca without running afoul of
the Russians, an Ottoman imperial official sent this order to the gover-

nor of Egypt:

Because the accursed Portuguese are everywhere, owing to
their hostilities against India, and the routes by which Mus-
lims come to the Holy Places are obstructed and, moreover,
it is not considered lawful for people of Islam to live under
the power of miserable infidels...you are to gather together
all the expert architects and engineers of that place...and
investigate the land between the Mediterranean and Red
Seas and...report where it is possible to make a canal in
that desert place and how long it would be and how many
boats could pass side-by-side.*°

The canal was not built. But the idea of one remained alive.

Cyprus and a Treaty

Selim II was known to have a fondness for wine—so much fondness,
in fact, that he has gone down in history as Selim the Sot. His favorite
wine came from the island of Cyprus, which was under the control of
the Republic of Venice. And so in 1571, the Ottomans accused the
Venetians of aiding pirates from Cyprus that attacked Ottoman vessels
and seized the island. This was in violation of a peace treaty that Selim
had concluded with the Venetians, but a Muslim cleric issued a fatwa for
Selim, explaining that a peace treaty with infidels could be set aside for

the greater good of Islam.

A land was previously in the realm of Islam. After a while
the abject infidels overran it, destroyed the colleges and
mosques, and left them vacant. They filled the pulpits and

226 The History or JiHAD: From MunAMMAD To ISIS

galleries with the tokens of infidelity and error, intending to
insult the religion of Islam with all kinds of vile deeds, and
by spreading their ugly acts to all corners of the earth...
When peace was previously concluded with other lands
in possession of the said infidels, the aforenamed land was
included. An explanation is sought as to whether, in accor-
dance with the [sacred law], this is an impediment to the
Sultan’s determining to break the treaty.

ANSWER:

There is no possibility that it could ever be an impediment.
For the Sultan of the people of Islam (may God glorify his
victories) to make peace with the infidels is legal only where
there is benefit to all Muslims. When there is no benefit,
peace is never legal. When a benefit has been seen, and it
is then observed to be more beneficial to break it, then to
break it becomes absolutely obligatory and binding.”

Lepanto

The Sublime Porte (as the Ottoman central government was known)
financed the Cyprus campaign by selling monasteries and churches out
from under the Christians who owned them.*’ But Selim the Sot was
to pay a heavy price for his Cyprus wine: in response to the Ottoman
action in Cyprus, Pope Pius V called another Crusade and formed the
Holy League, which consisted of the Papal States, Spain, the Republic
of Venice, the Republic of Genoa, the Knights of Malta, the Duchy of
Savoy, and several Italian duchies, and was intent upon destroying the
Ottoman Empire as a maritime power.

On October 7, 1571, the Holy League and the Ottomans, both with
over two hundred ships, met in what was until then the largest sea battle
ever at Lepanto, in the caliphate’s domains in Greece. The commander
of the Christian forces, Don John of Austria, told his men just before the
battle: “My children, we are here to conquer or to die as Heaven may de-

CHAPTER SEYEN 227

termine. Do not let our impious foe ask us, ‘Where is your God?’ Fight
in His holy name and in death or in victory you will win immortality.”

It was to be in victory. The Christian triumph was total: the Otto-
man fleet was completely destroyed, and as many as forty thousand ji-
hadis were killed. Eyewitnesses recalled that the sea was red with blood."

For the first time in a major battle, the Christian Europeans had
defeated the Ottomans, and there was rejoicing throughout Europe.
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, the author of Don Quixote, lost his left
hand at Lepanto and was known thereafter as El Manco de Lepanto,
that is, the One-Handed One of Lepanto. Referring to his own injury,
and himself in the third person, Cervantes said: “Although it looks ugly,
he holds it for lovely, because he received it on the most memorable and
lofty occasion which past centuries have beheld—nor do those [centu-
ries] to come hope to see the like.”** He recalled the Battle of Lepanto
as “that day so fortunate to Christendom when all nations were unde-
ceived of their error in believing that the Turks were invincible.”?? When
Pope Pius V heard the news, he thought of Don John of Austria and
murmured words from the New Testament: “There was a man sent from
God, whose name was John.”**

When he learned of the catastrophic defeat, Selim was enraged, and
declared that he was going to order that all the Christians in his do-
mains be executed.*” But cooler heads prevailed, and this order was not
issued. By the time the grand vizier Mehmed Sokullu met with Barbaro,
the ambassador from the Republic of Venice to the sultanate, in Con-
stantinople a few days after the battle, the Ottomans were determinedly
downplaying the significance of the battle. “You come to see how we bear
our misfortune,” said Sokullu to Barbaro. “But I would have you know
the difference between your loss and ours. In wresting Cyprus from you,
we deprived you of an arm; in defeating our fleet, you have only shaved
our beard. An arm when cut off cannot grow again; but a shorn beard
will grow all the better for the razor.””°

The Ottomans did indeed rebuild their fleet, and the Holy League
was not able to follow up on this victory with further effective strikes
against the caliphate. The shorn beard did indeed grow back. Nonethe-
less, Lepanto became a celebrated name throughout Europe and was
clear proof that the Ottomans could, after all, be beaten.

228 THe History oF Jinap: From MuuamMap to I$1$

The last casualty of Selim the Sot’s seizure of Cyprus was Selim
himself. In 1574 he visited a Turkish bath, where he drank a whole bottle
of his prized wine from Cyprus. Soon after, he slipped on the marble
floor and cracked his skull, dying at age fifty.*! His successor, Murad III,
was enamored of women as much as Selim was of wine, to the degree
that the price for sex slaves in the slave markets of Constantinople dou-
bled as the demand from the imperial court alone began to exceed the
supply. Murad was the father of over a hundred children,”

Murad was also mindful of jihad, launching an attack against Shi'ite
Persia in 1578 that included the Ottoman seizure of Christian Georgia,
where the Muslims quickly converted the churches into mosques.”* In
1587, Murad seized the Church of the Pammakristos in Konstantiniyye,
which had been the seat of the patriarchate of Constantinople since the
fall of the city in 1453, and converted it into the Mosque of Victory
(Fethiye Camii).“

The jihad against Europe also continued, when it was possible to
continue it amid increasing political instability. At Keresztes in north-
ern Hungary in 1596, the Ottomans under Sultan Mehmet II], bearing
the standard of Muhammad, the Prophet of Islam, decisively defeated
a Christian force of thirty thousand men.* Ten years later, however, the
Ottomans concluded a treaty with Habsburg Austria that demonstrated
how weak the sultanate had become. In the past, when temporary truc-
es had been concluded between the Ottomans and Austria, they had
been contemptuously headed “Graciously accorded by the Sultan, ever
victorious, to the infidel King of Vienna, ever vanquished.”** This new
treaty, however, treated the Ottoman sultan and the Austrian emperor
as equals.

And the decline continued. In 1621, the seventeen-year-old Osman
II, who had become sultan upon the deposition of his uncle Mustafa the
Mad (whose nickname reveals the reason for the deposition), led a jihad
force against Poland, but was so ignominiously defeated that the janis-
saries deposed him as well. He was murdered soon afterward.*

New Rigor

After a period of lax enforcement, in 1631 the sultan Murad IV attempt-
ed to ensure that the Ottoman decline was not a result of incurring the

CHAPTER SEVEN 229

divine wrath by lax enforcement of the Sharia. He issued a decree re-
stating the dress restrictions for dhimmis, to ensure that they would “feel
themselves subdued” (Qur’an 9:29):

Insult and humiliate infidels in garment, clothing and man-
ner of dress according to Muslim law and imperial statute.
Henceforth, do not allow them to mount a horse, wear sa-
ble fur, sable fur caps, satin and silk velvet. Do not allow
their women to wear mohair caps wrapped in cloth and
“Paris” cloth. Do not allow infidels and Jews to go about
in Muslim manner and garment. Hinder and remove these
kinds. Do not lose a minute in executing the order that I
have proclaimed in this manner.

Murad may have believed that this had worked in 1638 when he defeat-
ed the Safavids and took Baghdad (which the Persians had seized back
from the Ottomans in 1623). And indeed, the fortunes of the empire
began to turn, if ever so slightly. His successor, the sultan Ibrahim, in
1645 took the jihad back to Christian Europe once again, after pirates
operating from Malta captured a Turkish ship on which was one of his
favorite sex slaves.*” Ibrahim, in a wild fury, ordered the killing of all the
Christians in Ottoman domains. Once his noblemen talked him out of
that, he ordered that all Christian ambassadors to the Ottoman Empire
be imprisoned, and upon learning that the Maltese pirates were I'rench,
contemplated jihad against France. France, however, was far away; Crete,
a possession of the Republic of Venice, was closer. [brahim decided to
scize it, but in the end, it took the Ottomans twenty-four years to do so."

Worries about the divine wrath returned in 1660, when a fire
destroyed much of Constantinople. The Ottomans blamed the city’s
Jews and expelled them from the city. Inscribed in the royal mosque
in the city was a reference to Muhammad's expulsion of the Jews from
Medina; the mosque’s endowment deed includes a reference to “the
Jews who are the enemy of Islam.”*! Allah’s wrath, presumably, was

averted once again.

230 Tik Hisvrory or Jinan: From MunammMap to ISIS

Sobieski to the Rescue

With the jihad for Crete finally concluded successfully, the Ottomans
again moved against Poland, this time more successfully than before.
In 1672, the sultan Mehmet IV defeated a substantial Polish force and
won significant territorial concessions north of the Black Sea. The Polish
king Jan Sobieski would not, however, accept this, and went to war with
the Ottomans again four years later. Again the sultanate was victorious,
winning even more territory than it had before.”

Jan Sobieski, although forced in 1676 to accept the terms of a hu-
miliating peace treaty, was still not willing to accept this as a result. He
would be heard from again. His third chance came in the late summer of
1683, when Mehmet IV assembled a large force of jihad warriors and set
forth once more into Europe, intent upon succeeding in bringing it to
heel where his illustrious forbears had failed. At Osijek in the Ottoman
domains of Croatia, the forces of the Hungarian anti-Habsburg count
Emmerich Tekeli joined the Ottomans. Tekeli was the sultan’s vassal
king of western Hungary, set up to challenge and harass the Habsburgs.
Tekeli’s troops carried a standard inscribed “For God and Country” and
“Kruczes,” or “men of the cross,” thereby earning Tekeli a place among
the long list of Christian servants of the jihad, going back to Count Ju-
lian and continuing to Pope Francis.*?

Mehmet'’s grand vizier, Kara Mustafa, urged him to try again to take
Vienna, arguing that it was the key to the conquest of Europe and that
if he conquered it, “all the Christians would obey the Ottomans.”** The
jthadis duly placed Vienna under siege once again but did not count on
Jan Sobieski, who hurried to the city with a relief force. Approaching
Vienna, Sobieski saw the arrangement of the sultan’s forces around the
city and remarked, “This man is badly encamped. He knows nothing of
war, we shall certainly defeat him.”

In the dawn hours of September 12, he did. His forces descended
upon the surprised jihadis with fury, with Jan Sobieski himself leading
the charge. As the Polish king approached the very heart of the Muslim
camp, the Tatar khan, another vassal of Mehmet IV, saw him and ex-
claimed in shock and horror: “By Allah! The King really is among us!”**

The Ottoman siege was decisively broken, and Christendom once
again saved. The warriors of jihad fled in confusion.

Craptrer Srveren 2a

Four years later, the Ottomans made one last stand in Central Eu-
rope, facing the Austrians at Mohacs, where they had won such a deci-
sive victory in 1526. But these were no longer the days of Suleiman the
Magnificent. The warriors of jihad were beaten so badly that Austria
established control over much of Hungary and threatened Ottoman
holdings in the Balkans.

The jihadis would not return to the heart of Europe for several cen-
turies. When they did once more strike the West, it was in the New
World metropolises of New York and Washington. The day of that
strike was September 11, 2001. Many have speculated that the master-
mind of that jihad decided to set it on the anniversary of the high-water
mark of the jihadi advance into Europe, the day before the defeat of the
jihadis and the acceleration of the Ottoman decline set in motion the
chain of events that would Jead to the jihad’s becoming a dim memory
in the West.

In any case, after Vienna, Europe would, for a considerable time,
get a respite.

II. THE BARBARY STATES

That respite was to be from large-scale jihad attacks. North African pi-
rates, however, continued to harass European states with audacious jihad
raids, during which the primary goal was to seize Europeans for service
as slaves. This won them considerable renown among their peers; the
Muslim chronicler al-Magiri reported: “They lived in Salé, and their
sea-borne jihad is now famous. They fortified Salé and built in it palaces,
houses and bathhouses.”*”

Non-Muslim slaves did the bulk of this work. In 1611, a slave from
Timbuktu named Ahmed Baba, who had been enslaved by the Moroc-
cans in 1591 and was learned in Islam, wrote to the Moroccan sultan
Zidan Abu Maali protesting his enslavement on the grounds that he was
a Muslim. “The reason for enslavement,” he explained, “is disbelief. The
position of unbelieving Negroes is the same as that of other unbelievers,
Christians, Jews, Persians, Turks, etc.”*® He repeated the classic Islamic
formulation that unbelievers should be first invited to accept Islam or
dhimmi status, with jihad being waged against those who refused both.

232 Tue History or Jinap: From MunamMMAD TO ISIS

Captives taken in these jihad battles, if they were non-Muslim, could
legitimately be enslaved.

This was indeed the general practice in Morocco. Many of the slaves
in Morocco had been taken in raids on European Christian states. In
July 1625, a twenty-ship contingent of pirates from Morocco arrived in
Mount’s Bay in southern England. Bursting into the local parish church
during a service, they captured sixty men, women, and children from
the terrified congregation and took them back to Morocco, to live a life
of slavery. At Looe, they took eighty more and set the town ablaze. Ina
series of similar raids, they took two hundred people as slaves and seized
twenty-seven British ships as well.*?

During another raid soon after that, they seized Lundy Island and
made it their base, raising the flag of Islam. More slave raids followed.
The English could do little in response; as Francis Stuart, a veteran mar-
iner whom the Duke of Buckingham had sent to get rid of the pirates,
said of his foes, “They are better sailers than the English ships.’ By the
end of 1625, the English had lost a thousand ships to the pirates, and the
warriors of jihad from Morocco had gained a thousand English slaves.

One of these slaves, Robert Adams, who was ransomed and returned
to England, recounted that as a slave in Morocco he had been given only
“a littell coarse bread and water,” and lived in “a dungion under ground,
wher some 150 or 200 of us lay, altogether, having no comforte of the
light, but a littell hole.” Adams recounted that he was “every day beaten
to make me turn Turk,” that is, convert to Islam.

Despite efforts to conclude a truce and end the raids, they continued
for years; in May 1635 alone, the Muslims seized and enslaved 150 more
English people.” In 1643, Parliament ordered English churches to begin
taking up collections to pay ransom to the Muslims and buy back the
English slaves.** In the 1660s, the Moroccans began targeting American
colonial ships and enslaving those upon them as well.

AJl of this was in full accord with Islamic law, which envisions Mus-
lims taking non-Muslims captive in jihad attacks and, if it is deemed
beneficial to the Muslims, enslaving them. A manual of Islamic law stip-
ulates that “when an adult male is taken captive, the caliph considers the
interests...[of Islam and the Muslims] and decides between the prison-
er’s death, slavery, release without paying anything, or ransoming himself

CHAPTER SEVEN 233

in exchange for money or for a Muslim captive held by the enemy.”®

A revered Islamic jurist from the eleventh century, Al-Mawardi,
agreed: “As for the captives, the amir has the choice of taking the most
beneficial action of four possibilities: the first, to put them to death by
cutting their necks; the second, to enslave them and apply the laws of
slavery regarding their sale or manumission; the third, to ransom them
in exchange for goods or prisoners; and fourth, to show favor to them
and pardon them.”

The piracy and slave raids would continue, despite European efforts
to end them by force or persuasion.

Il. THE JIHAD IN INDIA

Sikandar Lodi and Babur

In 1501, the Delhi sultan Sikandar Lodi marched upon Dhulpur, where
he was able to occupy a Hindu fort. Upon entering the fort, Sikandar
demonstrated what to modern-day non-Muslims is the paradox of jihad
activity. He immediately fell to his knees and gave thanks to Allah for
the victory. At that same moment, according to Niamatullah, “the whole
army was employed in plundering and the groves which spread shade for
seven os around Bayana were torn up from the roots.”

For Sikandar Lodi and his jihadis, prayers juxtaposed with plunder
was not odd at all. Allah had granted the Muslims victory, and by the
dictates of Allah’s own law, that victory entitled them to the possessions
of the vanquished.

Three years later, during Ramadan, the month of jihad, in which
Muslims were to struggle to show their devotion to Allah, Sikandar, ac-
cording to Niamatullah, “raised the standard of war for the reduction of
the fort of Mandrail; but the garrison capitulating, and delivering up the
citadel, the Sultan ordered the temples and idols to be demolished, and
mosques to be constructed.” Then he “moved out on a plundering expe-
dition into the surrounding country, where he butchered many people,
took many prisoners, and devoted to utter destruction all the groves and

234 Tur History or Jinav: From MunAmMAD TO ISIS

habitations; and after gratifying and honouring himself by this exhibi-
tion of holy zeal he returned to his capital Bayana.”

At Mandrail, said Nizamuddin Ahmed, Sikandar “got the temples
demolished and mosques erected in their stead.”** Finding churches in
the same city, he had them destroyed as well.® Sikandar amplified his
contempt for Hinduism by persecuting the Hindus in his domains. Nia-
matullah noted that “the Islamic sentiment [in him] was so strong that
he demolished all temples in his kingdom and left no trace of them. He
constructed sarats, bazars, madrasas and mosques in Mathura, which is a
holy place of the Hindus and where they go for bathing, He appointed
government officials in order to make sure that no Hindu could bathe in
Mathura. No barber was permitted to shave the head of any Hindu with
his razor. That is how he completely curtailed the public celebration of
infidel customs.””° Mushtaqi added: “If a Hindu went there for bathing
even by mistake, he was made to lose his limbs and punished severely. No
Hindu could get shaved at that place. No barber would go near a Hindu,
whatever be the payment offered.””! This was because of the Qur’anic
dictum that the idolaters were “unclean.” (9:28)

Sikandar Lodi died in 1517, but the Hindus had no respite. Sikan-
dar’s son Ibrahim Lodi succeeded him as sultan, According to Niama-
tullah, [brahim Lodi sent jihad warriors to Gwalior, where they “cap-
tured from the infidels the statue of a bull which was made of metals
such as copper and brass, which was outside the gate of the fort and
which the Hindus used to worship. They brought it to the Sultan. The
Sultan was highly pleased and ordered that it should be taken to Delhi
and placed outside the Red Gate which was known as the Baghdad
Gate in those days.””? Later, however, the Mughal emperor Akbar the
Great ordered the bull to be melted down and the metal used for can-
nons and other weapons.”

Nor did the Hindus find any relief when the Mughal Babur defeated
Ibrahim Lodi in the First Battle of Panipat in 1526. The Mughal Em-
pire at its zenith covered most of the Indian subcontinent, as well as Af-
ghanistan, and continued the relentless jihad against the Hindus, Babur,
like Tamerlane, left behind a memoir, in which he recounted his exploits
with relish. “In AH 934 [AD 1528],” he wrote, “I attacked Chanderi
and, by the grace of Allah, captured it in a few hours, We got the infidels

CHAPTER SEVEN 235

slaughtered and the place which had been a daru /-harb [house of war]
for years, was made into a daru /-Islam [house of Islam].””

At Urwa, Babur noted, “people have carved statues in stone. They
are in all sizes, small and big. A very big statue, which is on the southern
side, is perhaps 20 yards high. These statues are altogether naked and
even their private parts are not covered. Urwa is not a bad place. It is
an enclosed space. Its biggest blemish is its statues. I ordered that they
should be destroyed.”

After battles with Hindu forces, Babur delighted in sitting by and
watching as the heads of the Hindus were piled up together, and the pile
grew higher and higher.’”* Sher Shah Suri, who took over the Mughal
Empire in 1540, was not as zealous for the deaths of infidels, but he
did his Islamic duty. In 1543, according to Shaykh Nurul Haq's con~
temporary history Zubdat ut-Tawarikh, the Hindu Puranmal “held oc-
cupation of the fort of Raisen.... He had 1000 women in his harem...
and amongst them several Musulmanis whom he made to dance before

77

him.”” That was intolerable. Sher Shah Suri thus resolved to take the
fort. “After he had been some time engaged in investing it, an accommo-
dation was proposed...and it was finally agreed that Puranmal with his
family and children and 4000 Rajputs of note should be allowed to leave
the fort unmolested.””

That, too, was intolerable. “Several men learned in the law [of Islam]
gave it as their opinion that they should all be slain, notwithstanding
the solemn engagement which had been entered into. Consequently, the
whole army, with the elephants, surrounded Puranmal’s encampment.
The Rajputs fought with desperate bravery and after killing their women
and children and burning them, they rushed to battle and were annihi-

79

lated to a man.

The End of the Vijayanagara Empire

The Hindu resistance was seldom strong or well-organized. The Mus-
lims had superior firepower, better organization, and in most cases, uni-
ty. Although there was always considerable internecine jihad between
rival Muslim factions, the warring groups could usually unite against
the infidels. In 1564, the sultans of Bijapur, Bidar, Ahmadnagar, and

236 Tne Hisrory or Jrnav: From MunamMMapb ro ISIS

Golkonda formed such an alliance against the Hindu Vijayanagara Em-
pire, which ruled southern India. The following January, Rama Raya,
the de facto Vijayanagara ruler, met the forces of the Muslim alliance
near a Vijayanagara fortress, Talikota, with a mixed force of Hindus and
Muslims. The Hindus were winning the battle when two Muslim gen-
erals fighting for Vijayanagara deserted and joined the jihadi alliance.
The Hindu line was broken, and Rama Raya was almost immediately
captured and beheaded.®

The Muslims quickly stuffed his head with straw and mounted it on
a pike for display. That was the turning point in the battle: the Hindus
fled in shock and confusion. Noted Firishta: “The Hindus, according to
custom, when they saw their chief destroyed, fled in the utmost disorder
from the field, and were pursued by the allies with such success that
the river was dyed red with their blood. It is computed by the best au-
thorities that above one hundred thousand infidels were slain during the
action and the pursuit.”""

‘To the victors went, as always, the spoils, as the Muslims entered
the city of Vijayanagar, the seat of the empire. In 1522, the Portuguese
traveler Domingos Paes had visited Vijayanagar, and reported that it was
comparable in size to Rome, with a population of five hundred thousand.
He called Vijayanagar “the best provided city in the world...for the state
of this city is not like that of other cities, which often fail of supplies and
provisions, for in this one everything abounds.” Inside the palace, he saw
a room “all of ivory, as well the chamber as the walls from top to bot-
tom, and the pillars of the cross-timbers at the top had roses and flowers
of lotuses all of ivory, and all well executed, so that there could not be
better—it is so rich and beautiful that you would hardly find anywhere
another such,”

It was in this grand city that the warriors of jihad now went to work,
“The plunder was so great,” said Firishta, “that every private man in
the allied army became rich in gold, jewels, effects, tents, arms, horses,
and slaves; as the sultans left every person in possession of what he had
acquired, only taking elephants for their own use.”* They slaughtered as
many people as they could and entered the temples in order destroy the
statues, After smashing the statues in the temple of Vitthalaswami, they
set fire to it.™

CHAPTER SEVEN 237

Akbar the Great

The Mughal emperor Akbar the Great in 1568 besieged the fort at Chit-
tor and ordered, after taking it, that everyone inside be killed. Abul Fazl,
Akbar’s official court historian, recorded that “there were 8,000 fighting
Rajputs collected in the fortress, but there were more than 40,000 peas-
ants who took part in watching and serving. From early dawn till midday
the bodies of those ill-starred men were consumed by the majesty of the
great warrior. Nearly 30,000 men were killed.... When Sultan Alauddin
[Khalji] took the fort after six months and seven days, the peasantry
were not put to death as they had not engaged in fighting. But on this
occasion they had shown great zeal and activity. Their excuses after the
emergence of the victory were of no avail, and orders were given for a
general massacre.”* Akbar himself gave effusive thanks to Allah for the
victory and issued a proclamation explaining with profuse quotations
from the Qur'an that everything he had done had been in accord with
Islamic law.

Akbar was not, however, a doctrinaire jihad warrior, and began to
manifest a growing disenchantment with Islam itself. He even abolished
the jizya, an extraordinary departure from Sharia mandates that made
him extraordinarily popular among the Hindus within his domains.*’ In
1579, he made contact with the Portuguese at Goa and asked them for
information about Christianity.** He began in that same year to preach
his own sermons at the mosque, and the following year even banned the
mention of Muhammad in public prayers.*” He favored the exclamation
“Allahu akbar,” but this was not a sign that he retained some belief in
orthodox Islam: since his name was Akbar, the phrase took on a thrilling
double meaning, not only “Allah is greater” but also “Akbar is Allah.””

In 1582, he finally made his break with Islam official, proclaim-
ing his new Divine Religion (Din Ilahi), which rejected Muhammad
as a prophet, essentially replacing him with Akbar himself. He began
to introduce practices derived from Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, Jainism,
and Christianity.*? He forbade the consumption of beef and the naming
of children Muhammad. Echoing Sharia laws for dhimmis, he forbade
Muslims to build new mosques or repair old ones. No one was to make
prostrations except to Akbar himself.”

238 THe Hisrory or Jinap: From MuntiaMMAD TO ISIS

Understandably, Akbar’s apostasy caused considerable consterna-
tion among Muslims, and the cadi of Jaunpur declared the emperor an
apostate, which meant that he could lawfully be deposed and killed.
Akbar, however, was superior to the rebels both in military might and
ruthlessness, and he was able not only to crush the rebellions but to
expand Mughal domains considerably in a series of wars with neigh-
boring Muslim kingdoms.

Other Muslims continued to wage jihad. In 1582, involving the
Turcoman Muslim commander Husain Quli Khan, the Taégat 1-Akbari
described how “the fortress [Aissar] of Bhim, which is an idol temple of
Mahamai, and in which none but her servants dwelt, was taken by the
valour of the assailants at the first assault. A party of Rajputs, who had
resolved to die, fought most desperately till they were all cut down. A
number of Brahmans who for many years had served the temple, never
gave one thought to flight, and were killed. Nearly 200 black cows be-
longing to Hindus had, during the struggle, crowded together for shelter
in the temple. Some savage Turks, while the arrows and bullets were fall-
ing like rain, killed those cows. They then took off their boots and filled
them with the blood and cast it upon the roof and walls of the temple.””

Akbar, however, was more concerned with expanding his domains.
When he died in 1605, his new religion died with him. It may have
died before that, as his son and his successor, Jahangir, who had revolted
against his father but managed to survive and succeed him, said that
before he died, Akbar began “returning again a little into the right way”
and showed that he was “once more an orthodox believer.”™

Jahangir himself was a rigid Muslim. In fact, Jahangir had the man
he blamed for his father’s discarding Islam killed, a man named Abul
Fazzel. Jt was he, said Jahangir, who had convinced Akbar that Muham-
mad was not a prophet but just a well-spoken con artist. “For towards the
close of my father’s reign,” Jahangir explained, “availing himself of the
influence which by some means or other he had acquired, he so wrought
upon the mind of his master {that is, Akbar], as to instil into him the
belief that the seal and asylum of prophecy, to whom the devotion of a
thousand lives such as mine would be a sacrifice too inadequate to speak
of, was no more to be thought of than as an Arab of singular eloquence,
and that the sacred inspirations recorded in the Koran were nothing else

CHAPTER SEVEN 239

but fabrications invented by the ever-blessed Mahommed.” Jahangir
gives his story a happy ending: “Actuated by these reasons it was that I
employed the man who killed Abul Fazzel and brought his head to me,
and for this it was that I incurred my father’s deep displeasure.”

His father was enraged and arranged for Jahangir to be passed over
in the imperial succession, arranging for Jahangir’s son to become em-
peror after him. Akbar, however, died without ensuring that his wish-
es would be implemented. Jahangir became emperor, and the jihad in
India resumed. It is noteworthy in any case that it took an emperor's
departure from Islam to give the Hindus of India any respite from the
jihadi onslaught.

Jahangir Returns India to Islam

Jahangir began his reign in 1606 by having the leader of the Sikhs, Guru
Agjan, tortured and killed. Some ascribed this to Arjan’s aiding of a rebel
prince, not to a determination to persecute the Sikhs.”® However, Jah-
angir himself wrote contemptuously of Arjan: “A Hindu named Arjun
lived in Govindwal on the bank of river Beas in the garb of a saint and in
ostentation. From all sides cowboys and idiots became his fast followers.
The business had flourished for three or four generations. For a long
time it had been in my mind to put a stop to this dukan-e-dati/ [market
of falsehood] or to bring him into the fold of Islam.”” Jahangir was also
said to have demanded that Arjan include passages from the Qur’an in
Adi Granth, the Sikh scripture.”

A contemporary court historian recounted that Jahangir also moved
against the Jains: “One day at Ahmadabad it was reported that many
of the infidel and superstitious sect of the Seoras [Jains] of Gujarat had
made several very great and splendid temples, and having placed in them
their false gods, had managed to secure a large degree of respect for
themselves and that the women who went for worship in those temples
were polluted by them and other people. The Emperor Jahangir ordered
them banished from the country, and their temples to be demolished.””
Again following the practice of previous jihad rulers, Jahangir ordered
contempt to be shown to the gods of the conquered people: “Their idol
was thrown down on the uppermost step of the mosque, that it might

240 Tur History oF JinAD: FROM MunamMMAD To ISIS

be trodden upon by those who came to say their daily prayers there. By
this order of the Emperor, the infidels were exceedingly disgraced, and
Islam exalted.”

Exalting Islam was Jahangir’s priority. Another contemporary his-
torian noted Jahangir’s zealousness for the religion: “The Emperor by
the divine guidance, had always in view to extirpate all the rebels in his
dominions, to destroy all infidels root and branch, and to raze all Pagan
temples level to the ground. Endowed with a heavenly power, he devoted
all his exertions to the promulgation of the Muhammadan religion; and
through the aid of the Almighty God, and by the strength of his sword,
he used all his endeavours to enlarge his dominions and promote the
religion of Muhammad.”!!

Jahangir also manifested his Islamic piety in his memoirs:

On the 7th Azar I went to see and shoot on the tank [holy
water pool] of Pushkar, which is one of the established
praying-places of the Hindus, with regard to the perfection
of which they give [excellent] accounts that are incredible
to any intelligence, and which is situated at a distance of
three kos from Ajmir. For two or three days I shot water-
fowl on that tank and returned to Ajmir. Old and new tem-
ples which, in the language of the infidels, they call Deo-
hara are to be seen around this tank. Among them Rana
Shankar, who is the uncle of the rebel Amar, and in my
kingdom is among the high nobles, had built a Deohara
of great magnificence, on which 100,000 rupees had been
spent. I went to see that temple. I found a form cut out of
black stone, which from the neck above was in the shape of
a pig's head, and the rest of the body was like that of a man.
The worthless religion of the Hindus is this, that once on a
time for some particular object the Supreme Ruler thought
it necessary to show himself in this shape; on this account
they hold it dear and worship it. I ordered them to break
that hideous form and throw it into the tank. After looking
at this building there appeared a white dome on the top of
a hill, to which men were coming from all quarters. When ]
asked about this they said that a Jogi lived there, and when

CHAPTER SEVEN 241

the simpletons come to see him he places in their hands
a handful of flour, which they put into their mouths and
imitate the cry of an animal which these fools have at some
time injured, in order that by this act their sins may be blot-
ted out. | ordered them to break down that place and turn
the Jogi out of it, as well as to destroy the form of an idol
there was in the dome.”

Jahangir was proud of his efforts to extirpate Hinduism, and had plenty
of them to relate:

I am here led to relate that at the city of Banaras a temple
had been erected by Rajah Maun Singh, which cost him the
sum of nearly thirty-six laks of five methkaly ashrefies [a
considerable sum]. The principal idol in this temple had on
its head a tiara or cap, enriched with jewels to the amount of
three laks ashrefies. He had placed in this temple moreover,
as the associates and ministering servants of the principal
idol, four other images of solid gold, each crowned with
a tiara, in the like manner enriched with precious stones.
It was the belief of these Jehennemites that a dead Hin-
du, provided when alive he had been a worshipper, when
laid before this idol would be restored to life. As I could
not possibly give credit to such a pretence, I employed a
confidential person to ascertain the truth; and, as I justly
supposed, the whole was detected to be an impudent im-
posture. Of this discovery I availed myself, and I made it
my plea for throwing down the temple which was the scene
of this imposture and on the spot, with the very same ma-
terials, I erected the great mosque, because the very name
of Islam was proscribed at Banaras, and with God's blessing
it is my design, if I live, to fill it full with true believers.

Immediately after relating this story of jihad and persecution with pride,
Jahangir recounted his heretical father Akbar the Great’s answer when
Jahangir asked him why he didn’t persecute the Hindus:

242 Tue History or Jinap: From Muxuamman To ISIS

“My dear child,” said he, “I find myself a puissant mon-
arch, the shadow of God upon earth. I have seen that he
bestows the blessings of his gracious providence upon all
his creatures without distinction, Should I discharge the
duties of my exalted station, were I to withhold my com-
passion and indulgence from any of those entrusted to
my charge? With all of the human race, with all of God's
creatures, | am at peace: why then should I permit myself
under any consideration, to be the cause of molestation
or aggression to any one? Besides, are not five parts in
six of mankind either Hindus or aliens to the faith; and
were I to be governed by motives of the kind suggested in
your inquiry, what alternative can I have but to put them
all to death! I have thought it therefore my wisest plan
to let these men alone. Neither is it to be forgotten, that
the class of whom we are speaking, in common with the
other inhabitants of Agrah, are usefully engaged, either in
the pursuits of science or the arts, or of improvements for
the benefit of mankind, and have in numerous instances
arrived at the highest distinctions in the state, there being,
indeed, to be found in this city men of every description,
and of every religion on the face of the earth,”

Jahangir passed on this sage advice without comment. Since he juxta-
posed it in his memoirs with his account of how he destroyed the temple
and built the mosque at Banaras, he apparently intended this quotation
to stand as a subtle rebuke of his father, and an indication of how he had
eschewed his heresy and returned to Islamic orthodoxy.

During Jahangir's reign, the perilous existence that the Hindus
had endured before Akbar the Great abandoned Islam returned. The
Dutch merchant Francisco Pelsaert, in India while Jahangir was emper-
or, recounted that the Hindus were not safe even when Sunnis and Shi’a
fought among themselves. He wrote that during Muharram, when the
Shi’a mourn publicly the death of Husayn at Karbala, the Sunnis and
Shi’a would battle, and Hindus could all too easily get caught in the
middle: “The outcry [of mourning] lasts till the first quarter of the day;
the coffins [/aztas] are brought to the river, and if the two parties meet

CHAPTER SEVEN 243

carrying their biers [it is worse on that day], and one will not give place
to the other, then if they are evenly matched, they may kill each other
as if they were enemies at open war, for they run with naked swords like
madmen. No Hindu can venture into the streets before midday, for even
if they should escape with their life, at the least their arms and legs would
be broken to pieces.”15

The English merchant William Finch, also in India around the
same time, stated that Jahangir and his noblemen also used Hindu peas-
ants for sport, and traded for horses and dogs. They played a game called
Kamargha (human circle), which consisted of having guards surround
a tract of wooded land. Inside the enclosed space, everything alive was
prey. “Whatever is taken in this enclosure,” Finch related, “is called the
King’s shikar or game, whether men or beasts.... The beasts taken, if
men's meat, are sold...if men, they remain the King’s slaves, which he
sends yearly to Kabul to barter for horses and dogs: these being poor,
miserable, thievish people, that live in woods and deserts, little differing
from beasts.”!°* Some of those Hindus who lived in woods and deserts
may have been there in order to escape the persecution of the Muslims.
In any case, Jahangir’s rejection of his father’s words—“With all of the
human race, with all of God’s creatures, I am at peace: why then should |
permit myself under any consideration, to be the cause of molestation or
aggression to any one?”—could not have been more complete.

Shah Jahan

Jahangir died in 1627. His successor, Shah Jahan, continued his per-
secution of the Hindus. Shah Jahan’s court historian Abdul Hamid
Lahori recorded in his Padshahnama (Chrontcle of the Emperor) the em-
peror’s swift action in 1633 against Hindus who tried to build new
temples to replace the many that Muslims had destroyed: “It had been
brought to the notice of His Majesty that during the late reign many
idol temples had been begun, but remained unfinished at Benares, the
great stronghold of infidelism. The infidels were now desirous of com-
pleting them. His Majesty, the defender of the faith, gave orders that
at Benares, and throughout all his dominions at every place, all temples
that had been begun should be cast down. It was now reported from

244 THe History of Jinap: From MutiamMmap ro ISIS

the province of Allahabad that 76 temples had been destroyed in the
district of Benares.”"”

That same year, according to Lahori, “400 Christian prisoners, male
and female, young and old, with the idols of their worship” were brought
“to the presence of the faith-defending Emperor. He ordered that the
principles of the Muhammadan religion should be explained to them,
and that they should be called upon to adopt it. A few appreciated the
honour offered to them and embraced the faith: they experienced the
kindness of the Emperor. But the majority in perversity and wilfulness
rejected the proposal. These were distributed among the amuirs, who
were directed to keep these despicable wretches in rigorous confinement.
When any one of them accepted the true faith, a report was to be made
to the Emperor, so that provision might be made for him. Those who
refused were to be kept in continual confinement. So it came to pass that
many of them passed from prison to hell. Such of their idols as were
likenesses of the prophets were thrown into the Jumna [river], the rest
were broken to pieces.”1*

Two years later, Shah Jahan’s jihadis overran Bundela, the Rajput
kingdom in central India. The jihadis seized the wives of Jajhar Singh,
the Bundela king, and presented them to Shah Jahan, who, heedless of
their status, made them sex slaves. To head off the possibility of future
rebellions, Shah Jahan had Jajhar’s son and grandson forcibly converted
to Islam.'*’ In Orchha, the capital of the Bundela kingdom, Shah Jahan
had the majestic temple of Bir Singh Dev demolished and a mosque
built where it had stood."

Aurangzeb

This continued when Shah Jahan became seriously ill in 1657, for his
son and heir apparent, Dara Shikoh, was a man in the mold of his
great-grandfather, Akbar the Great: he was deeply influenced by Sufism
and so admired Hinduism that he declared the Upanishads to be a divine
revelation that predated the Qur'an. He was also so friendly with the
Portuguese Jesuits that he was rumored to be on the verge of converting
to Christianity. All of this made the prospect of his becoming Mughal
emperor abominable to his younger brother, Aurangzeb, a devout and

CHAPTER SEVEN 245

committed Muslim." Aurangzeb defeated his brother in battle and had
him beheaded; when the head was presented to him, Aurangzeb was said
to have shed tears.''? He had Shah Jahan placed under house arrest, and
dedicated himself to outdoing all his predecessors in persecuting and
waging jihad against the Hindus.

The contemporary historian Mirza Muhammad Kazim recount-
ed that Aurangzeb undertook this task with relish: “In 1661 Aurang-
zeb in his zeal to uphold the law of Islam sent orders to his Viceroy
of Bihar, Daud Khan, to conquer Palamau. In the military operations
that followed many temples were destroyed.... Towards the end of the
same year, when Mir Jumla made a war on the Raja of Kuch Bihar, the
Mughals destroyed many temples during the course of their operations.
Idols were broken and some temples were converted into mosques.”!"

Another Muslim historian, Saqa Mustad Khan, writing just after
Aurangzeb died in 1707, compiled a detailed record of Aurangzeb’s jihad
activity from the emperor's state archives. In 1669, “the Lord Cherisher
of the Faith,” Khan wrote, “learnt that in the provinces of Tatta, Multan,
and especially at Benares, the Brahman misbelievers used to teach their
false books in their established schools, and that admirers and students
both Hindu and Muslim, used to come from great distances to these
misguided men in order to acquire this vile learning. His Majesty, eager
to establish Islam, issued orders to the governors of all the provinces to
demolish the schools and temples of the infidels and with the utmost
urgency put down the teaching and the public practice of the religion of
these misbelievers.”*"*

Khan recorded with obvious pride how, in 1670, the present capital
of Pakistan got its name:

During this month of Ramzan [Ramadan] abounding in
miracles, the Emperor as the promoter of justice and over-
thrower of mischief, as a knower of truth and destroyer of
oppression, as the zephyr of the garden of victory and the
reviver of the faith of the Prophet, issued orders for the
demolition of the temple situated in Mathura, famous as the
Dehra of Kesho Rai. In a short time, by the great exertions
of his officers, the destruction of this strong foundation of
infidelity was accomplished, and on its site a lofty mosque

246 Tue History or Jihad: From MunamMMapD TO ISIS

was built at the expenditure of a large sum. Praised be the
august God of the faith of Islam, that in the auspicious
reign of this destroyer of infidelity and turbulence, such a
wonderful and seemingly impossible work was successfully
accomplished. On seeing this instance of the strength of the
Emperor's faith and the grandeur of his devotion to God,
the proud Rajas were stifled and in amazement they stood
like images facing the wall. The idols, large and small, set
with costly jewels which had been set up in the temple were
brought to Agra, and buried under the steps of the mosque
of the Begam Sahib, in order to be continually trodden

upon. The name of Mathura was changed to Islamabad.'”

That same year, Aurangzeb also issued this sweeping decree: “Every
idol-house built during the last 10 or 12 years, whether with brick or
clay, should be demolished without delay. Also, do not allow the crushed
Hindus and despicable infidels to repair their old temples. Reports of the
destruction of temples should be sent to the Court under the seal of the
qazis and attested by pious Shaikhs.”"®

Aurangzeb also had the temple Viswanath at Kashi destroyed."”
At Khandela in 1679, his jihadis demolished the temple and killed the
three hundred Hindus who were defending it. Aurangzeb’s commander
followed the familiar practice: “Khan Jahan Bahadur came from Jodh-
pur, after demolishing the temples and bringing with himself some cart-
loads of idols, and had audience of the Emperor, who highly praised him
and ordered that the idols, which were mostly jewelled, golden, silvery,
bronze, copper or stone, should be cast in the yard [ji/aukhbanah] of the
Court and under the steps of the Jama mosque, to be trodden on. They
remained so for some time and at last their very names were lost.”"8

And on and on. Saqa Mustad Khan reported that in January 1680,
“the Emperor went to view lake Udaisagar, constructed by the Rana, and
ordered all the three temples on its banks to be demolished.” The follow-
ing day, “Hasan Ali Khan brought to the Emperor twenty camel-loads of
tents and other things captured from the Rana’s palace and reported that
one hundred and seventy-two other temples in the environs of Udaipur
had been destroyed.”'"? Later that year, “Abu Turab, who had been sent

CHAPTER SEVEN 247

to demolish the temples of Amber, returned to Court...and reported
that he had pulled down sixty-six temples.”

Aurangzeb rewarded the destroyers of temples. Hasan Ali Khan “re-
ceived the title of Bahadur Alamgirshahi.”"! And Hamiduddin Khan
Bahadur, “who had gone to demolish a temple and build a mosque [in
its place] in Bijapur, having excellently carried out his orders, came to
Court and gained praise and the post of darogha of gusalkhanah, which
brought him near the Emperor’s person.”!

Aurangzeb personally issued orders for the destruction of temples.
“The temple of Somnath,” he wrote, “was demolished early in my reign
and idol worship [there] put down. It is not known what the state of
things there is at present. If the idolaters have again taken to the worship
of images at the place, then destroy the temple in such a way that no
trace of the building may be left, and also expel them [the worshippers]
from the place.”!%

On another occasion, he issued this order: “The houses of this coun-
try [Maharashtra] are exceedingly strong and built solely of stone and
iron. The hatchet-men of the government in the course of my marching
do not get sufficient strength and power [that is, time] to destroy and
raze the temples of the infidels that meet the eye on the way. You should
appoint an orthodox inspector [derogha] who may afterwards destroy
them at leisure and dig up their foundations.”'** Aurangzeb had Sikh as
well as Hindu temples demolished, and mosques built in their place.’
He observed: “The demolition of a temple is possible at any time, as it
cannot walk away from its place.”!”°

The Ganj i-Arshadi, another contemporary Muslim account of Au-
rangzeb’s reign, related an instance of Hindu resistance that resulted in
the emperor’s undertaking even harsher measures:

The infidels demolished a mosque that was under construc-
tion and wounded the artisans. When the news reached
Shah Yasin [one of Aurangzeb’s commanders], he came to
Banaras from Mandyawa and collecting the Muslim weav-
ers, demolished the big temple. A Sayyid who was an ar-
tisan by profession agreed with one Abdul Rasul to build
a mosque at Banaras, and accordingly the foundation was
laid. Near the place there was a temple and many hous-

248 THe History oF Jinan: From Muuamman To ISIS

es belonging to it were in the occupation of the Rajputs.
The infidels decided that the construction of a mosque in
the locality was not proper and that it should be razed to
the ground. At night, the walls of the mosque were found
demolished. Next day, the wall was rebuilt but it was again
destroyed. This happened three or four times.”

Finally Shah Yasin “determined to vindicate the cause of Islam.” He and
his jihadis “demolished about 500 temples. They desired to destroy the
temple of Beni Madho, but as lanes were barricaded, they desisted from
going further,”!”

According to the eighteenth-century Muslim history Kanzw 1-
Mabfuz, there was in the city of Agra a temple that was a popular pil-
grimage site. The Mughal rulers had for years collected a fee from the
pilgrims, thereby considerably augmenting the royal treasury. When he
found out about it, however, Aurangzeb was furious and forbade pil-
grimages to the temple. His noblemen tried to reason with him, ex-
plaining that there would be a great loss of revenue for the government
if these pilgrimages were forbidden. Aurangzeb replied: “What you say
is right, but I have considered well on the subject, and have reflected on
it deeply; but if you wish to augment the revenue, there is a better plan
for attaining the object by exacting the jizya. By this means, idolatry
will be suppressed, the Muhammadan religion and the true faith will be
honoured, our proper duty will be performed, the finances of the state
will be increased, and the infidels will be disgraced.” The noblemen were
pleased with this solution, and Aurangzeb ordered the Agra temple de-
stroyed,!?

Aurangzeb did not reintroduce the jizya only for the Hindus of
Agra, but in 1679 for all the Hindus in his domains, in order to, so said
the decree, “spread Islam and put down the practice of infidelism.”!°
A delegation of Hindus appealed to Aurangzeb to reconsider. They re-
minded him that Akbar the Great, as well as Jahangir and Shah Jahan,
had not collected the yizya, and their domains had prospered:

Such were the benevolent intentions of your ancestors.
Whilst they pursued these great and generous principles,
wheresoever they directed their steps, conquest and pros-

expelled from the cities.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

perity went before them, and then they reduced many
countries and fortresses to their obedience. During your
majesty’s reign, many have been alienated from the empire,
and further loss of territory must necessarily follow, since
devastation and rapine now universally prevail without re-
straint. Your subjects are trampled under foot, and every
province of your empire is impoverished, depopulation
spreads, and difficulties accumulate.

If Your Majesty places any faith in those books by dis-
tinction called divine, you will there be instructed that God
is the God of all mankind, not the God of Muhammadans
alone. The Pagan and the Musalman are equally in His
presence. Distinctions of colour are of his ordination. It is
He who gives existence. In your temples, to His name the
voice is raised in prayer; in a house of images, when the
bell is shaken, still He is the object of adoration. To vilify
the religion or customs of other men is to set at naught the
pleasure of the Almighty. When we deface a picture we
naturally incur the resentment of the painter; and justly
has the poet said, “Presume not to arraign or scrutinize the
various works of power divine.” In fine, the tribute you de-
mand from the Hindus is repugnant to justice; it is equally
foreign from good policy, as it must impoverish the coun-
try; moreover, it is an innovation and an infringement of
the laws of Hindostan.**!

249

Aurangzeb was as unmoved by this as Jahangir was by Akbar the

132

Great’s explanation of why he didn’t persecute the Hindus. The jizya
was reimposed, and Aurangzeb persecuted the Sikhs as well. The his-
torian Khafi Khan, a contemporary of Aurangzeb, noted that he also
“ordered the temples of the Sikhs to be destroyed and the guru's agents
[masands] for collecting the tithes and presents of the faithful to be

Saqa Mustad Khan found much to admire in Aurangzeb because of

all this:

As his blessed nature dictated, he was characterized by

250 THe Hisrory of Jinap: From MuuHaAMMAD To ISIS

perfect devotion to the rites of the Faith; he followed the
teaching of the great Imam, Abu Hanifa (God be pleased
with him!), and established and enforced to the best of his
power the five foundations of Islam. Through the auspices
of his hearty endeavour, the Hanafi creed [that is, the Or-
thodox Sunni faith)] has gained such strength and currency
in the great country of Hindustan as was never seen in the
times of any of the preceding sovereigns. By one stroke of
the pen, the Hindu clerks [writers] were dismissed from
the public employment. Large numbers of the places of
worship of the infidels and great temples of these wicked
people have been thrown down and desolated. Men who
can see only the outside of things are filled with wonder at
the successful accomplishment of such a seemingly difficult
task. And on the sites of the temples, lofty mosques have
been built.’

Bakhtawar Khan, a nobleman during Aurangzeb’s reign, was also pleased,
noting that “Hindu writers have been entirely excluded from holding
public offices, and all the worshipping places of the infidels and great
temples of these infamous people have been thrown down and destroyed
in a manner which excites astonishment at the successful completion
of so difficult a task. His Majesty personally teaches the sacred kalima
[fundamentals of the Islamic faith] to many infidels with success. All the
mosques in the empire are repaired at public expense. Imams, criers to
the daily prayers, and readers of the khutba [sermon] have been appoint-
ed to each of them, so that a large sum of money has been and is still laid
out in these disbursements.”"™

By the time of Aurangzeb’s death in 1707, he was so hated for his
harshness, and not just toward the Hindus and Sikhs, that the Mughals
faced numerous rebellions. But the jihad, as always, would go on.

PDF created by Rajesh Arya - Gujarat

CHAPTER EIGHT

DEGRINGOLADE

Jthad in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

I. THE OTTOMANS IN DECLINE

Wars with Russia and Austria

The Ottoman Empire for much of its existence conducted its affairs in
much the same way European states did, declaring war and concluding
treaties. Underlying all of its activity, however, was the jihad imperative,
which ensured that its foreign policy remained imperialistic and expan-
sionist. Yet this expansion, as the empire declined, was often more a
matter of theory than of practice.

When King Charles XII of Sweden fled to the Sublime Porte after
being defeated by Czar Peter the Great in 1709, the Ottomans, who had
a treaty with the Russians, nonetheless refused to turn Charles over to
them; they saw a chance to expand their domains north of the Black Sea
at the Russians’ expense.

Charles spent his time in Constantinople trying to gain support for
an Ottoman attack on the Russians, which the Tatar Ottoman clients in
the Crimea very much wanted as well. After much intrigue, in October
1712, the Ottoman Empire declared war on Russia.’ The Ottomans,
victorious, forced Peter the Great to give up Azov on the Don River, east
of the Crimea, along with other territories, as well as to provide a safe
conduct for Charles XII to get back to Sweden and to promise to with-
draw Russian armies from Poland. Peter, in a deep depression, lamented:

“The Lord God drove me out of this place, like Adam out of paradise.”

252 Tne History or Jinan: From MuwamMap ro [S15

Peter the Great was being a trifle overdramatic. The Russian losses
were not actually very great. In fact, Charles of Sweden was enraged that
the Ottomans did not pursue and destroy utterly the retreating Russian
army, By this time, however, the sultanate had neither the will nor the
resources to take the jihad to the Russian infidels in a major and concert-
ed effort to win and hold more territory; its posture toward the Russians
remained primarily defensive, even as it declared war in 1712.

The Ottomans had at the same time lowered their sights in Eu-
rope. In 1715 they seized Morea from the Republic of Venice, which,
like the Ottoman Empire, had seen better days. But they were not able
to enjoy their victory for long, as the Habsburg emperor Charles VI,
who was allied with the Venetians, saw the capture of Morea as an act
of war. The Austrians advanced upon Belgrade, defeating the Otto-
mans in 1716, taking from them by a subsequent treaty most of their
Balkan territories.?

The days of Ottoman jihadis threatening the very survival of Chris-
tian Europe were at an end. The states of Europe began to look for
opportunities to strengthen their domains against the Ottomans. ‘The
eighteenth-century Muslim historian Umar Busnavi recounted what led
the Russians to declare war against the Ottomans in 1735, and the Aus-
trians to join two years later, ascribing it all to the perception of Ottoman
weakness. Busnavi’s language also shows that even if the Ottoman ability
to pursue jihad had waned, the Ottomans still tended to see the world in
terms of Islam’s uncompromising believer/unbeliever division:

It was owing to the perfidious Muscovite infidels having
violated their engagements with the Porte, that five thou-
sand chosen men, standard-bearers, surgeons, and a num-
ber of brave officers, had been sent to the Russian frontiers,
for the purpose of aiding the army of the faithful against
the aggressions of the infidels. This circumstance left the
kingdom of Bosnia in a great measure exposed, and also
afforded an occasion to the infidel Germans to believe, that
the country was in such a defenceless state, that they also
were induced to violate the peace. Both Germans and Mus-
covites had formed, long before this, schemes against the
peace and tranquillity of the empire; and now both began

CHaprer Ficnt 253

to put their wicked designs into execution. Owing to the
disasters which had befallen the empire in the east, these
hateful wretches, the Germans, were led to think, when
they perceived that Bosnia and the adjacent provinces were
in a defenceless state in consequence of the war with the
Muscovites, that the exalted Mohammedan power had be-
come lax and feeble. They became inflamed with prospects
of success, and wickedly resolved on attacking the Ottoman
empire in various quarters.‘

This time, however, the Ottomans were victorious, and won back all
the territory the empire had lost twenty years before in Serbia, Bosnia,
and Wallachia. Busnavi attributed this in large part to the valor of the
Bosnian Muslims, Europeans who had embraced Islam rather than the
sufferings that dhimmitude entailed. He explained that “by reason of
this country’s vicinity to the infidel nations, such as the deceitful Ger-
mans, Hungarians, Serbs [Sclavonians], the tribes of Croats, and the
Venetians, strong and powerful, and furnished with abundance of can-
non, muskets, and other weapons of destruction, it has had to carry on
fierce war from time to time with one or other, or more, of these deceitful
enemies—enemies accustomed to mischief, inured to deeds of violence,
resembling wild mountaineers in asperity, and inflamed with the rage of
seeking opportunities of putting their machinations into practice.” The
Bosnians, said Busnavi, “know this,” and were in response “strong, coura-
geous, ardent, lion-hearted, professionally fond of war, and revengeful.”°
Europe would see more of these aggressive and warlike qualities in the
late twentieth century.

The Wahhabi Revolt

Even as the Ottomans remained, for people such as Busnavi, guard-
ians and foremost exponents of Islam, they presently faced a challenge
from other Muslims on precisely those grounds. In the 1740s, a Muslim
preacher in Arabia named Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahhab began to
preach against “ignorance, shirk, and innovation.”° Ssirk is worshipping
others along with or aside from Allah, and is the foremost sin in Islam;
innovation (4id’ah) is the adoption of practices that neither the Qur'an

254 True History or Jruap: From MutiAmmap To ISIS

nor Muhammad mandate. Wahhab demanded that all shirk and bid'ah
be swept away, and that Muslims return to strict observance solely of
what was taught in the Qur'an and Sunnah. Wahhab’s teachings were
so simple that one of his publications, The Book of Monotheism (Kitab
al-Tauhid), consisted of nothing but ahadith, traditional reports of Mu-
hammad’s words and deeds, without a single word of comment or expla-
nation from Wahhab at all.’

But Wahhab’s message was as powerful as it was crude. He wrote to

the people of Qasim in Arabia:

I assert that jihad will always be valid under the Jmam’s
leadership, whether [he is} righteous or sinner; praying be-
hind [sinner] isnams is also permissible.

Jibad cannot be stopped by the injustice of the unjust or
even the fairness of those who are just.

I believe that hearing and obeying Muslim rulers is
[mandatory (wazid)], whether they are righteous or sinners,
as long as they do not enjoin Allah’s disobedience.

And he who becomes the Caliph and the people take
him as such and agree to his leadership, or if he overpowers
them by the word to capture the KAi/afah [until he captures
it, then obedience to him becomes a necessity and rising
against him becomes Aaram (forbidden)].

I believe the people of 4id’ah should be boycotted and
shunned until they repent.

I judge people of 4:d’ah according to their outward
conduct and refer knowledge of their inward [state of

faith] to Allah...®

Despite these declarations that the Muslim ruler must be obeyed, Wah-
hab and his jihadis began to wage jihad against the local authorities
in Arabia, coming ever closer to a direct challenge to Ottoman pow-
er. (Wahhab’s statements about obeying Muslim rulers, however, would
prove quite useful to the later Saudi state.) The Ottomans and other
Muslims, he charged, had departed from this strict observance and were
thus guilty of 4id’ah and apostasy; they were no longer Muslims.

CHAPTER EIGHT 255

After gaining the loyalty of Uthman ibn Muammar, the emir of
Uyayna in Arabia, Wahhab and his warriors began to gain notice by
smashing the tomb of Zayd ibn al-Khattab, a companion of Muham-
mad, as Wahhab held that the tombs of the saints were idolatrous.
Shortly thereafter, Wahhab personally stoned an accused adulteress to
death, an act that won him great admiration; he began to gain followers
in large numbers. “Thereafter,” writes a modern-day Saudi biographer
of Wahhab, “his cause flourished, his power increased, and true tauhid
[monotheism] was everywhere disseminated, together with the enjoin-
ing of virtue and the prohibition of vice.”

Expelled under pressure from Uyayna, Wahhab moved on to Di-
riyya, cementing an alliance with the local emir that would have global
consequences: the ruler’s name was Muhammad ibn Saud.'° Wahhab
told Saud about his plans to wage jihad against all those who were not,
in his view, implementing Islam properly, and Saud agreed to help. In
1746, they formally announced the beginning of this jihad, and began
to plunder and pillage their way across Arabia. The Wahhabis soon con-
quered most of Najd, and then Riyadh in 1773."! According to the nine-
teenth-century French historian Louis Alexandre Olivier de Corancez,

who wrote a history of the Wahhabis from their origins though 1809:

At the moment when they were least expected, the Waha-
bis would arrive to confront the tribe they wished to subject,
and a messenger from Abd al-Aziz ibn Saud would appear
bearing a Koran in one hand and a sword in the other. His
message was stark and simple: Abd el Aziz to the Arabs of
the tribe of , hail! Your duty is to believe in the book I
send you. Do not be like the idolatrous ‘Turks, who give God
a human intermediary. If you are true believers, you shall be
saved; otherwise, I shall wage war upon you until death.”

The Ottomans, meanwhile, were too busy with the Russians to pay all
of this much notice. The partition of Poland in 1764 by Catherine the
Great of Russia and Frederick the Great of Prussia enraged the sultan
Mustafa ITI, who was anxious for a new war with Russia. His advisors,
noting the weakness of the empire by that point, counseled against it,
but Mustafa was determined, telling them, “I will find some means of

256 Tut History oF Jinao: From MunamMap To ISIS

humbling these infidels.”"’ The war came in 1768, and ended disastrous-
ly for the Ottomans in 1774, with the Muslims, not the infidels, ending
up humbled. They lost, among other things, political sovereignty over
the Tatar territories north of Black Sea, although the treaty recognized
that the Ottoman sultan, as the caliph of Islam, would still have spiri-
tual authority there. The Russian czar, in a reciprocal arrangement that
displayed Ottoman weakness to the world, was acknowledged as the
protector of the Christians in the Ottoman domains of Wallachia and
Moldavia, with the right to intervene militarily on their behalf.”*
Another war between the Ottoman Empire and Russia and Austria
between 1787 and 1792 only confirmed the loss of the Crimea and oth-
er Black Sea territories, which had been formally annexed by Russia.
The sultan Abdulhamid, mindful of Catherine the Great’s designs on
Constantinople, had Ottoman coins of this period labeled “Struck in
Islambol,” a name for the city meaning “Full of Islam” that was common
among Ottoman Turks of the time, rather than “Struck in Constantino-
ple” (although after the war, the Ottomans began using the name Con-
stantinople again).’® This both emphasized the Islamic character of the
city and courted divine favor. The Islamic scholars of Islambol awarded

Abdulhamid himself the title Warrior for the Faith.’

Enter Napoleon

But in the end, none of it helped. The Ottomans were so weak that they
could not prevent Napoleon Bonaparte from invading Egypt in 1798.
Napoleon professed his love for the Qur’an and Muhammad. To one
imam he actually professed the Islamic faith, saying: “Glory to Allah!
There is no other God but God; Mohammed is his prophet, and J am one
of his friends.... ‘The Koran delights my mind.... I love the prophet.”"”
He told Egyptian imams that it was “the will of Mohammed” that the
Egyptians ally with the French against the Mamluks.'® He denounced
the Russians to the Ottoman sultan, saying that they “abhor those who
believe in the unity of God, because, according to their lies, they believe
that there are three,” an echo of the Qur’an’s warning to Christians to
“say not “Three” (4:171), that is, do not profess the faith in the Holy
Trinity.'* But when asked later if he had actually become Muslim, Napo-

CHAPTER EIGHT 257

leon laughed off that idea, saying: “Fighting is a soldier’s religion; I never
changed that. The other is the affair of women and priests. As for me, I
always adopt the religion of the country I am in.””

The Egyptian people, however, were never convinced and never ac-
cepted his rule. The Egyptian historian Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti, who
lived through the French occupation of Egypt, gave one reason why Na-
poleon and his men were so unpopular: the French, he wrote, treated the
dhimmi populations as equals; they allowed “the lowliest Copts, Syrian
and Orthodox Christians, and Jews” to mount horses and bear arms, in
blithe indifference to Sharia rules.”!

The Ottoman sultan Selim ITT declared jihad against the French.”
The French ventured into the Ottoman province of Syria in 1799 but were
defeated, after which Napoleon returned to France, leaving his troops in
Egypt under the command of General Jean-Baptiste Kéber, who quickly
won several victories over the Ottomans and the Egyptians. The following
year, however, Suleiman al-Halabi, a student at Cairo’s venerable Islamic
university, al-Azhar, stabbed Kléber to death. Al-Halabi was executed and,
in a foreshadowing of the twenty-first-century tendency in the West to see
all jihad activity as a manifestation of mental illness, his skull was sent to
France, where for years it was displayed to enable students of phrenology
to study its “bump of crime and fanaticism.”

Kléber’s successor, Jacques Frangois de Menou, took Napoleon's
professed admiration for Islam one step farther, marrying an Egyptian
woman and actually converting to Islam, taking the name Abdallah, But
even this did not endear the French to the Egyptians, and gained Me-
nou the contempt of his troops.** When the British arrived in 1801 to
help the Ottomans against the French, they found Menou, who was
not nearly as able a commander as Kléber (Napoleon called him “that
fool Menou’), totally unprepared; the French withdrew from Egypt that
same year.”°

Egypt was not under direct Ottoman control (it was semiautono-
mous under the Mamluks), but the French had defeated the Ottomans
more than once, and this invasion from a far-off Western European
Christian state was yet another serious blow to the Ottoman self-image
as tough, if no longer invincible, jihadis. The most memorable result
of Napoleon's Egyptian venture is widely believed to be the loss of the

258 Tue History or Jiniap: From MunammManp tro ISIS

Sphinx’s nose, shot off by French soldiers during target practice. This,
however, is yet another piece of Islamic apologetic mythmaking; in
reality, the nose had been removed centuries before the French got
there, by the fourteenth-century Sufi Muslim leader Muhammad Sa’im
al-Dahr. Al-Dahr had discovered that some of the Muslim peasants in
Egypt, ignorant of their own faith’s prohibitions against idolatry, were
worshipping the Sphinx; he had the nose chipped off in order to show
the impotence of this massive god statue.”°

The Wahhabis in Mecca

Meanwhile, the Wahbhabis continued advancing in Arabia. Saud died in
1766, and Wahhab in 1791, but the movement did not die with them.
In 1801, the Wahhabis raided Karbala in Iraq, slaughtering about two
thousand of the city’s inhabitants, destroying the gravesite of Husayn
and carrying off the jewels that had adorned his tomb, along with all
the gold, silver, and other precious items they found in the city, They
took Ta’if in Arabia in February 1803, killing two hundred people and
burning all the books they found aside from the Qur’an and volumes of
the hadith. Then, in April 1803, they entered Mecea and demanded the
submission of the city’s Islamic scholars; they were, however, driven out
that summer. After seizing Medina in 1805, the Wahhabis returned to
Mecca the following year, staying for six years this time, during which
they destroyed many of the tombs it contained.

The Ottomans, as busy as they were with the Russians, could not
ignore the Wahhabi occupation of the two holiest sites in Islam. Yet
even they must have known that the Wahhabi/Saudi challenge to their
power was in the tradition of many other such challenges throughout
Islamic history. The Ottoman caliphate itself began as a challenge to the
Abbasids. The Abbasids arose in revolt against the Umayyads. Muaw-
iyya, the first Umayyad caliph, challenged the authority of Ali, the last
“Rightly-Guided Caliph,” and waged jihad against him. Wahhab was
an Islamic revivalist in the mold of Ibn Tumart, who led the Almohad
revolt against the Almoravids in Morocco in the early twelfth centu-
ry. Ottoman officials had their own comparisons. The Ottoman admi-
ral Eyiib Sabri Pasha compared the Wahhabis to the Qarmatians, the

CHAPTER Etaur 259

tenth-century thieves of the Black Stone of Mecca; other Ottoman offi-
cials likened them to the Khawarij, who in the beginning decades of Is-
lam waged bloody jihad against all Muslims they considered sinful—that
is, all other Muslims.?’

In 1812, Muhammad Ali Pasha, the governor of Egypt, drove the
Wahhabis from Medina and several months later from Mecca as well.
Seven years later, he sacked the Wahhabi capital of Diriyya and exe-
cuted two of Wahhab’s grandsons. Abdullah ibn Saud, by this time the
leader of the Wahhabis, was sent to Constantinople, where he was also
executed.*® But the Ottomans were too weak to keep Muhammad Ali
Pasha’s troops stationed in Arabia indefinitely and, once they left, the
Wahhabis began a resurgence, establishing their new capital in Riyadh.
In 1832, the Wahhabis invaded Oman and forced the sultan of Muscat
to pay them tribute.”

In the middle of the nineteenth century, the British realized the
Wahhabis’ potential as a tool in their long-term plan to destroy the Ot-
toman Empire. In 1865, they put the Saud family on the imperial pay-
roll; by 1917, the Saudis were receiving five thousand pounds from the
British every month, just to keep up the pressure on the Ottomans.”
Once again, the shortsighted calculations of non-Muslim politicians
practicing realpolitik ended up aiding the global jihad.

Meanwhile, in the first decade of the nineteenth century, jihad raged
with new intensity in sub-Saharan Africa, where Islam and its wars of
conquest had been a presence since the fourteenth century. The Islamic
scholar Usman dan Fodio declared jihad against the Hausa kingdoms of
northern Nigeria and ultimately established the Sokoto Caliphate, with
himself as caliph, in what is today Nigeria and Cameroon. Dan Fodio's
success led to the creation of other Islamic states in Central and West
Africa, which lasted until they were defeated by European colonialists.

Dan Fodio’s Sokoto Caliphate fell to the British in 1903.

Greek Independence

By the early nineteenth century, the Wahhabis were the least of the
Ottomans’ troubles. In 1804, the Serbs rose in rebellion against their
Ottoman masters, who ruthlessly put the uprising down. The governor

260 THe History or Jinan: From MunaMMAD TO ISIS

of Belgrade, Suleiman Pasha, had the rebels burned alive as they hung
by their feet. Others he had castrated or bastinadoed (caning the soles
of their feet). Still others he had impaled outside the city gates, their
bodies serving as a warning to others who might have been contem-
plating rebellion.*

But revolution was in the air all over the world, and no Ottoman
brutality could quench the thirst for independence among its subject
Christian peoples. In 1821, it was the Greeks of the Morea. Thomas
Gordon, a British army officer, published 7he History of the Greek Revo-
Jution in 1833, providing a vivid account of the Greek rage after centuries
of oppression, and the brutality of the Ottoman response.

After the Greek independence fighters took Kalavryta, a small town
that the Ottomans surrendered without a fight, the Greeks proceeded
to Patras. After hearing what had happened at Kalavryta, the warriors
of the Sultan were prepared to make a stand. According to Gordon, the
Turks “commenced hostilities by setting fire to the house of a primate,
named Papadiamandopoulos; but being attacked by a body of Ionians,
that were prepared for the conflict, they fled to the castle, and opened a
cannonade against the town. The Greek population immediately rose,
and, amidst volleys of musketry, proclaimed with loud shouts the liberty
of their country.””

The two sides, Gordon reported, “massacred each other without

mercy.”*

Archbishop Germanos, the metropolitan of Patras, and, said
Gordon, “the other Greek generals, Papadiamandopoulos, Londos, Zai-
mis, and Sotiri, primates of Patrass, Vostizza, and Kalavryta, set forth
a proclamation containing merely these emphatic words—Peace to the
Christians! Respect to the Consuls! Death to the Turks!”*4

Chanting, “Not a Turk shall remain in the Morea,” the Greeks, hav-
ing endured centuries of brutal oppression, began a pitiless campaign
against the Muslims, who were ready to respond in kind.*® On the island
of Crete, the janissaries killed the metropolitan of Candia and five bish-
ops at the altar of their cathedral.** And in Patras on Palm Sunday, ac-
cording to Gordon, “the Christians had prepared to celebrate with pomp
a festival ushered in by inauspicious omens; first a smart shock of an
earthquake, then a cannonade announcing the arrival of Yussuf Pasha,

CuHarerer Eiout 261

and lastly the appearance of an Ottoman brig of war, which saluted the
fort, and cast anchor before the town.”*” That was the end of the Palm
Sunday festivities. “The Mussulmans obtained a rich booty, and for sev-
eral days the Pasha and his troops amused themselves at their leisure in
impaling or beheading prisoners and circumcising Christian children.”*®

Determined to put down the rebellion, one week later the Ottomans
arrested the patriarch of Constantinople, Gregory V, shortly after the
conclusion of the Paschal Divine Liturgy on Easter Sunday. Although
he had not worked with the rebels or said anything about the rebellion,
Ottoman officials were determined to make an example of him, and told
the patriarch that he was being dismissed from his office, as he was “un-
worthy of the patriarchal dignity and ungrateful to the Sublime Porte
and a traitor.”*’ He was stripped of his patriarchal robes, imprisoned, and
tortured. His torturers told him that his misery could be ended simply
by his conversion to Islam, but he replied, “Do your job. The patriarch of
the Orthodox Christians dies as an Orthodox Christian.’”*°

And so he did. The Ottomans hanged him in front of the gates of
his patriarchate and left his body there, as a warning to others who might
have been contemplating rebellion, for three days. Then, in keeping with
their standard procedure of keeping the dsimmi communities antago-
nistic to one another, and to prevent them from uniting against their
overlords, they prevailed upon some Jews of Constantinople to cut down
the body and throw it into the sea.*!

But the Ottomans could not crush the rebellion. The Greeks of the
Morea won their independence. And more trouble was coming for the
sultanate. The Albanian commander Mehmet Ali Pasha, appointed their
wali (viceroy) in Egypt in 1805, began to pursue an independent course,
ultimately challenging Ottoman control of Syria. The British and French
Empires were ultimately the beneficiaries of this infighting, moving into
Egypt and Syria, respectively. That would not be, however, for several
more decades; and in the short term, the Ottomans needed British and
French help in yet another war with the Russians over the Crimea.

Their help was going to come only at a price. Stratford Canning, the
British ambassador to the Sublime Porte, in 1842 protested to the sultan
Abdulmecid after seeing two Christians who had converted to Islam

262 Tur History or Jin#Ap: From MuttaAmMMAD TO ISIS

and then returned to Christianity éxecuted in accord with Islam's death
penalty for apostasy. He urged the caliph to “give his royal word that
henceforward neither should Christianity be insulted in his dominions,
nor should Christians be in any way persecuted for their religion.””

Needing British support, Abdulmecid agreed, for which Queen
Victoria sent him congratulations. As the British and French allied with
the Ottomans against Russia in the Crimean War, Canning used the
increasing Ottoman dependence on the Western powers to continue to
press the Ottomans for reform of the ddimmi laws. This culminated in
the Hatt-i Humayun decree of 1856 that enacted what were known as
the Tanzimat reforms, declaring that all Ottoman subjects were equal
before the law, regardless of religion.

The Europeans added the Hatt-i Humayun decree to the Treaty of
Paris that ended the Crimean War, and praised “the Sultan’s generous
intentions towards the Christian population of his Empire.”” Howev-
er, the British and French severely disappointed Canning by assuring
the Ottomans and the world that they did not consider themselves to
have any right “to interfere either collectively or individually in the re-
lations of the Sultan with his subjects or in the interna! administration
of the Empire.”

Canning knew this would doom the reform: without Western pres-
sure, the Ottomans would continue to enforce Islamic law, as the im-
mutable law of Allah was more important and more binding than any
treaty or decree. The Sublime Porte, Canning said, would “give way to
its natural indolence and leave the firman [decree] of reform...a lifeless
paper, valuable only as a record of sound principles,”

That is exactly what happened. The British consul James H. Skene
wrote to another British official on March 31, 1859, that “the Christian
subjects of the sultan at Aleppo still live in a state of terror.” He attribut-
ed this to the trauma they had suffered nine years earlier, when

..-houses were plundered, men of distinction among them
were murdered, and women violated.... They were not al-
lowed to ride in the town, not even to walk in the gardens.
Rich merchants were fain to dress in the humblest garb to

Chapter Eiertr 263

escape notice; when they failed in this they were often forced
to sweep the streets or act as porters in order to give proofs of
their patience and obedience; and they were never addressed
by a Mussulman without expressions of contempt.”

Another British consul, James Brant, wrote in July 1860 about “the in-
ability of the Sultans [sic] Government to protect its Christian subjects,”
referring to massacres of Christians by Muslim mobs in Ottoman do-
mains.” Yet another British consul, James Finn, wrote at the same time
that “oppression against Christians usually begins with the fanatic popu-
lace, but it is neither repressed nor punished by the Government.” This
was because the “fanatic populace” was as aware of Islamic law as the
government was, and was much more determined to enforce it.

Some Ottoman officials, on the other hand, realized that what the
“fanatic populace” wanted was not always what was best for them. The
grand vizier Ali Pasha gave the Sultan Abdulaziz a revolutionary reason
why he should support these reforms: strict adherence to the Sharia was
actually weakening the empire. Christians, being barred from military
service, which was supposed to be one element of their subjugation, were
getting rich devoting themselves to other pursuits, and the jizya was not
enough to strip them of all this wealth:

The [unequal] privileges enjoyed by different communities
arise from inequalities in their obligations. This is a grave
inconvenience. The Muslims are absorbed almost entirely
in the service of government. Other people devote them-
selves to professions which bring wealth. In this way the
latter establish an effective and fatal superiority over Your
Majesty’s Muslim subjects. In addition [only the Muslims
serve in the army]. Under these circumstances the Muslim
population, which decreases at a frightening rate, will be
quickly absorbed and become nothing more than a tiny mi-
nority, growing weaker day by day.... What is a man good
for when he returns to his village after spending the most
vigorous part of his life in the army barracks or camps...?
Muslims must, like the Christians, devote themselves to

264 Tur History oF Jinap: From MuynamMMAD TO ISIS

[commercial] agriculture, trade, industry and crafts. Labour
is the only durable capital. Let us put ourselves to work,
Sire, that is the only way to safety for us. There is still time
to liberate the Muslim population from obligations which
benefit the Christians.... Let the Christians furnish sol-
diers, officers and government functionaries in proportion
to their numbers.*?

This was an extraordinary statement, and in a more devout age it might
have cost Ali Pasha his head for implying that adherence to the law of
Allah was disadvantageous in this world for the Turks, when Allah had
promised that the believers would prosper in this world as well as in the
next. Ali Pasha was presaging the subversive idea that Kemal Ataturk
would make the basis of his secular Turkish government after World
War 1: the reason for Turkish failure was Islam, and the only path to its
resuscitation required discarding Islam, at least as a political system.
Meanwhile, the Ottoman Empire continued its decline, although
the sultan Abdulhamid I], who reigned from 1876 to 1909, declared that
the caliphate was as powerful as it ever was and could be summoned by
his word. He raised the prospect of jihad’s being waged by Muslims who

were living under the rule of the colonial powers:

As long as the unity of Islam continues, England, France,
Russia and Holland are in my hands, because with a word
[1] the caliph could unleash the chad among their Muslim
subjects and this would be a tragedy for the Christians....
One day [Muslims] will rise and shake off the infidel’s yoke.
Eighty-five million Muslims under [British] rule, 30 mil-
lion in the colonies of the Dutch, 10 million in Russia...
altogether 250 million Muslims are beseeching God for
delivery from foreign rule. They have pinned their hopes
on the caliph, the deputy of the Prophet Muhammad. We
cannot [therefore] remain submissive in dealing with the
great powers.”

But this was just empty bravado. In practice, Abdulhamid had little
choice but to remain submissive in dealing with the great powers. At the

CHarrer Eicut 265

Conference of Berlin in 1878, his caliphate had little choice but to give
up almost its European territories. Now Bosnia, Wallachia, Moravia,
Bulgaria, and Serbia were all outside its domains. Without a shot, the
Ottomans also handed over Cyprus, over which so much jihadi blood
had been shed in the past, to the British.

Slavery in Tripoli, Dhimmitude in Morocco

In the North African lands formerly under Ottoman control, little
changed with the waning of Ottoman power. In 1818, Captain G. F.
Lyon of the British Navy traveled to Tripoli, where he noted that Mu-
hammad al-Mukani of the Bey of Fezzan (in modern southwestern
Libya) “waged war on all his defenceless neighbours and annually car-
ried off 4000 or 5000 slaves. From one of these slave hunts into Kanem
he had just returned to Tripoli, with a numerous body of captives and
many camels, and was, in consequence, in the highest favour with the
Bashaw,” that is, the sultan of Tripoli, Yusuf Karamanli.*! The sultan,
noted Lyon, possessed “about fifty young women, all black and very
comely.,.guarded by five eunuchs, who keep up their authority -by oc-
casionally beating them.””

Lyon witnessed the arrival of a shipment of slaves in Murzuq;:

At the end of the month [August 1819], a large Kaff/é [car-
avan] of Arabs, Tripolines, and Tibboo, arrived from Bor-
nou, bringing with them 1400 slaves of both sexes and all
ages, the greater part being females.... We rode out to meet
the great Aaff/é, and to see them enter the town—it was in-
deed a piteous spectacle! The poor oppressed beings were,
many of them, so exhausted as to be scarcely able to walk,
their legs and feet were much swelled, and by their enor-
mous size, formed a striking contrast with their emaciated
bodies. They were all borne down with loads of firewood;
and even poor little children, worn to skeletons by fatigue
and hardships, were obliged to bear the burthen, while
many of their inhuman masters rode on camels, with the
dreaded whip suspended from their wrists, with which they,
from time to time, enforced obedience from these wretched

266 Tae History or Jinap: From MunHAMMAD To ISIS

captives. Care was taken, however, that the hair of the fe-
males should be arranged in nice order, and that their bod-
ies should be well oiled, whilst the males were closely shav-
en, to give them a good appearance on entering the town.
All the traders speak of the slaves as farmers do of cattle.”’

In 1842, the British consul general in Morocco asked the Moroccan
sultan Abd al-Rahman what he was doing to restrict the slave trade.
Abd al-Rahman was incredulous, responding that “the traffic in slaves
is a matter on which all sects and nations have agreed from the time of

"54 He said that he was “not aware of

the sons of Adam...up to this day.
its being prohibited by the laws of any sect” and that the very idea that
anyone would question its morality was absurd: “no one need ask this
question, the same being manifest to both high and low and requires
no more demonstration than the light of day.” From the beginnings
of Islam until the end of the eighteenth century, Muslim slave traders
who shared these views sent nearly ten million souls from sub-Saharan
Africa to the slave markets of the Islamic world, generally making sure
to enslave non-Muslims, not fellow Muslims.*°

The dhimmi laws also remained in force in Morocco, A traveler to
that country in 1880 reported that “a deputation of Israelites, with a
grave and reverend rabbi at their head,” asked the local Muslim ruler for
permission “for them to wear their shoes in the town. “We are old, Ba-
shador,’ they said, ‘and our limbs are weak; and our women, too, are del-
icately nurtured, and this law presses heavily upon us.” As reasonable as
this request was, and as humane as it would have been for the bashador
to grant it, the traveler expressed relief that the Jews decided not to ask
after all. He “was glad they were dissuaded from pressing their request,
the granting of which would exasperate the populace, and might lead to
consequences too terrible to contemplate.”*”

Eight years later, the Anglo-Jewish Association pushed for the ab-
olition of dhimmi laws in Morocco, under which Jews were required
to “live in the ghetto.... On leaving the ghetto they are compelled to
remove their footwear and remove their headcovering.... Jews are not
permitted to build their houses above a certain height.... Jews ‘are not

CHAPTER EIGHT 267

allowed to drink from the public fountains in the Moorish quarter nor
to take water therefrom’ as the Jews are considered unclean.”** The An-
glo-Jewish Association appeal went nowhere.

The Armenian Genocide Begins

Meanwhile, more infidel blood was to be shed in another historic field
of jihad, Asia Minor. In 1894, the Armenians rebelled at having to pay
taxes both to Kurdish warlords in Anatolia and to the Ortoman state.
‘The sultanate was in no mood to hear them out, and began massacring
Armenians ruthlessly, committing mass rapes, killing even children, and
burning Armenian villages.

The chief dragoman (Turkish interpreter) of the British Embassy
wrote that those who committed these atrocities were “guided in their
general action by the prescriptions of Sheri [Sharia] Law. That law pre-
scribes that if the ‘rayah’ [subject] Christian attempts, by having recourse
to foreign powers, to overstep the limits of privileges allowed to them
by their Mussulman masters, and free themselves from their bondage,
their lives and property are to be forfeited, and are at the mercy of the
Mussulmans. To the Turkish mind, the Armenians had tried to overstep
these limits by appealing to foreign powers, especially England. They,
therefore, considered it their religious duty and a righteous thing to de-
stroy and seize the lives and property of the Armenians.”*”

On August 18, 1894, the Ottoman authorities began a massacre of
Armenians in the Sassoun region of eastern Asia Minor that lasted a full
twenty-four days, until September 10. British vice consul Cecil M. Hall-
ward investigated the massacre and reported to the British crown that “a
large majority of the population of some twenty-five villages perished,
and some of the villages were unusually large for this country.” At Bitlis,
Ottoman soldiers “took eighty tins of petroleum...[which] was utilized
for burning the houses, together with the inhabitants inside them.””

At Geliguzan, “a number of young men were bound hand and foot,
laid out in a row, had brushwood piled on them, and were burned alive.”
And “many other disgusting barbarities are said to have been commit-
ted, such as ripping open pregnant women, tearing children to pieces by

268 Tre History of Jinan: From MuxaAMMAD TO ISIS

main force.” At yet another Armenian village, “some sixty young wom-
en and girls were driven into a church, where some soldiers were ordered
to do as they liked with them and afterwards kill them, which order was
carried out.”** Hallward noted that he collected these details largely from
“soldiers who took part in the massacre.”®

The jihad against the Armenians went on even in Constantinople,
after Armenian revolutionaries seized the Bank Ottoman in 1894. In
retaliation, Muslim mobs for two days bludgeoned Armenians to death
with cudgels wherever they found them. The streets of the great city
again ran red with blood, as they had on May 29, 1453, when Mehmet
the Conqueror and his jihad warriors broke through the Byzantine
defenses. The British chargé in Constantinople wrote that the “Turkish
mob” was aided by “a large number of softas [student of Islamic theol-
ogy] and other fanatics...individuals wearing turbans and long linen
robes rarely seen in this part of the town. They mostly carried clubs
which had evidently been carefully shaped after a uniform pattern;
some had, instead of these, iron bars...there is nothing improbable in
the stories current that the clubs and bars...were furnished by the mu-
nicipal authorities.”

The French ambassador pointed to “the interminable series of
events which exhaustively prove that it is the Sultan himself who arms
these bludgeoners, exhorting them to go out and extirpate all that is
Armenian. It is maintained that the police had given advance notice to
all these rascals, distributing to them the cudgels, and deploying them
at convenient spots.”*’ The Austrian military attaché likewise charged
that Ottoman authorities gave the mobs cudgels and sticks “fitted with
a piece of iron” and told them “to start killing Armenians, irrespective of
age and gender, for the duration of 48 hours...the method of killing in-
volved the bludgeoning of the victims with blows on their heads. These
horrible scenes repeated themselves before my eyes interminably.”® The
Russian Embassy dragoman Maximof indignantly carried one of the
cudgels into the very palace of the sultan, declaring: “The Turks are kill-
ing in the streets the poor Armenians with these cudgels.”®

The killing went on elsewhere in Ottoman domains as well. At Er-
zurum in 1895, the Ottomans massacred Christians indiscriminately and

CHarter Eicut 269

then buried three hundred of them in a mass grave. At Urfa in December
1895, the Armenians gathered in their cathedral and requested Ottoman
government protection, which the officer in charge granted, surrounding
the cathedral with troops. Then other Ottoman troops, along with local
Muslim civilians, rampaged through the city, slaughtering Armenians
and plundering their houses. A large group of young Armenians was
taken to the local imam, who ordered them to be held down. An eyewit-
ness said that the sheikh then recited some verses of the Qur’an and “cut
their throats after the Mecca rite of sacrificing sheep.”

The French ambassador reported that in September 1896 in Egin,
the Ottomans perpetrated “a terrible massacre” of “upwards of 2,000
Armenians,” including “many women and children.” Here again, ac-
cording to a British official on the scene, “an indirect order was sent
from the Palace for the massacres in question to be carried out.” An-
other British official reported that at Malatya, “over 100 Armenians had
gathered for safety” when Ottoman troops entered. The Armenians here
received much the same treatment they had been given the previous year
in Urfa: they “were circumcised, and afterwards killed as ‘kurban,’ i.e.
thrown upon their backs and their throats cut, after the manner in which
sheep are sacrificed.””

The German historian Johannes Lepsius visited the devastated areas
at the time and chronicled the atrocities. He referred to the cover-up of
these horrific events that had already begun:

Are we then simply forbidden to speak of the Armenians as
persecuted on account of their religious belief? If so, there
have never been any religious persecutions in the world...
We have lists before us of 559 villages whose surviving in-
habitants were converted to Islam with fire and sword; of
568 churches thoroughly pillaged, destroyed and razed to the
ground; of 282 Christian churches transformed into mosques,
of 21 Protestant preachers and 170 Gregorian [Armenian]
priests who were, after enduring unspeakable tortures, mur-
dered on their refusal to accept Islam. We repeat, however,
that those figures express only the extent of our information,

270 Tue History oF JIHAD: From Munammap To ISIS

and do not by a long way reach to the extent of the reality. Is
this a religious persecution or is it not?”

Lepsius also reported that the Muslims had destroyed 2,500 Christian
villages and 645 churches and monasteries, and that the number of those
who had been forced to convert to Islam was fifteen thousand. Three hun-
dred twenty-eight churches were converted into mosques, and 508 more
were plundered.” One Ottoman soldier wrote home enthusiastically:

My brother, if you want news from here we have killed 1,200
Armenians, all of them as food for the dogs.... Mother, I
am safe and sound. Father, 20 days ago we made war on the
Armenian unbelievers. Through God’s grace no harm befell
us.... There is a rumour afoot that our Batallion will be
ordered to your part of the world—if so, we will kill all the
Armenians there, Besides, 511 Armenians were wounded,
one or two perish every day.”

In its dotage, the Ottoman sultanate was more savage than ever.

Il. THE BARBARY WARS
The Barbary (Berber) states of Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli, which were

nominally Ottoman possessions but de facto independent, continued
their jihad piracy and slave raids throughout the eighteenth century.
They targeted American colonial vessels along with European ships,
and when the United States of America declared its independence, they
targeted its fleet as well. In 1784, pirates from neighboring Morocco
captured the American ship Beésey and took its crew hostage, demanding
that the new nation pay tribute to avoid future such incidents.”

The Americans, newly independent and having neither the resourc-
es nor the desire to get involved in a war with the Barbary states, paid
the tribute. But once it had been established that the Americans would
give in to the jihadi demands, those demands grew. In 1795, a payment
to Algiers of nearly a million dollars comprised sixteen percent of federal
revenue for that year.”

CHAPTER Etcat pre

Even peace overtures came from a posture of bullying superiority:
in June 1796, Pasha Hamouda, the bey of Tunis, offered to conclude
a peace treaty with the United States, and stipulated that the Ameri-
cans had six months to consider the offer, during which Tunisian pirates
would not attack American ships. lf they rejected the offer, the raids
would resume, leaving the Americans no room to maneuver. Hamouda
signed his treaty officer as “commander. ..of the frontier post of the Holy
War,” suggesting at once that the piracy was in service of a larger goal—
jihad, conquest, and Islamization of the non-Muslim world—and that if
the Americans rejected the offer, they would face war not just with Tunis
but with the entire global forces of jihad.”

In the treaty that the United States concluded in 1797 with Tripoli,
the payment of earlier tribute by the Americans was acknowledged, and
the U.S. consul in Tripoli was directed to deliver to the ruler of Tripo-
li “twelve thousand Spanish dollars” as well as various supplies for the
construction of ships.*° That treaty also contained, in the English text
only, a statement designated as Article 11, which appears to be designed
to reassure the bey of Tripoli that the United States was not hostile to
Islam; for reasons never explained, however, this article does not appear
in the treaty’s Arabic text.”!

As the government of the United States of America is not
in any sense founded on the Christian Religion, — as it
has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, reli-
gion or tranquility of Musselmen, — and as the said States
never have entered into any war or act of hostility against
any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no
pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce
an interruption of the harmony existing between the two

countries.

The lack of hostility of any “Mehomitan nation” toward the United
States, however, could not be assured. In 1786, Thomas Jefterson and
John Adams met in London with Sidi Haji Abdrahaman, the eya/et (ad-
minister) of Tripolitania’s ambassador to London. Jefferson recounted to
Congress what Abdrahaman’s response was when he and Adams asked

272 THe History or Jittaps From Munammap tro ISIS

him “concerning the ground of the pretensions to make war upon na-
tions who had done them no injury”:

The ambassador answered us that it was founded on the
Laws of the Prophet, that it was written in their Koran,
that all nations who should not have answered their au-
thority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to
make war upon them wherever they could be found, and
to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners, and that
every Mussulman who should be slain in battle was sure to
go to Paradise.*®

Thus it had been since the beginning of Islam, and thus it would re-
main. This particular eruption of the long hostility that Barbary piracy
represented came to a head in 1801, when Yusuf Karamanli, the bashaw
of Tripoli, increased his demands on an already cash-strapped repub-
lic, demanding two hundred and twenty thousand dollars up front and
twenty-five thousand dollars each year from the United States.

The new president, Thomas Jefferson, opted to go to war rather
than continue paying these increasingly exorbitant tributes. Emerging
victorious against the Barbary states in 1805 and again in a second war
in 1815, the Americans freed themselves from paying tribute and put an
end to this long episode of jihad on the high seas. The Americans would,
of course, hear again much later from those who believed, as did Sidi
Haji Abdrahman, that “all nations who should not have answered their
authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon
them wherever they could be found.”

Ill. THE MUGHALS IN DECLINE

The British Raj and Jihad in Abeyance

The best days of the Mughal Empire, like those of the Ottoman Empire,
were behind it by the beginning of the eighteenth century. But even as
the power of their state diminished, the Mughals kept up the pressure on
the Hindus as much as they could. In the 1720s, the nawab of Bengal,

CHartrer EICHT 273

Murshid Quli Khan, who was ostensibly under the authority of the Mu-
ghal emperor but operated independently, decided to attack the Hindu
stronghold of Tipara.

An eighteenth-century Muslim historian, Azad al-Husaini, not-
ed that “Tipara is a country extremely strong. The Raja is proud of his
strength and the practice of conch-blowing and idol-worship prevailed
there.”** The Tipara soldiers fought valiantly to defend their fort at Udai-
pur but were defeated. As Murshid Quli’s men entered the fort, they
found the Hindu soldiers lying dead “in heaps.”*° The Muslims cried
out “Allahu akbar” and repeated the Islamic profession of faith, “There is
no god but Allah and Muhammad is his prophet.”** They immediately
destroyed the temple and had an Islamic sermon read out at its ruins in
the name of the Mughal emperor Muhammad Shah. Azad al-Husaini
concluded his account of this by writing: “The world-illuminating sun of
the faith of Muhammad swept away the dark night of infidelity, and the
bright day of Islam dawned.”®”

The world-illuminating faith of Muhammad, however, was not able
to save the Mughals from the Hindu Maratha Empire, which steadi-
ly gained ground against the Mughals until it ruled most of India by
the middle of the eighteenth century. The Mughals, by that time, ruled
over little more than the capital of Delhi. When the Marathas moved
into Punjab in 1758, however, they attracted the notice of Ahmad Shah
Durrani, a military commander who had just staked out his own impe-
rial realm in Afghanistan.

Durrani had invaded the Mughal Empire several times, but this
time the issue was larger than the question of who would rule in a par-
ticular area: the Marathas, as Hindus, should not be ruling over Mus-
lims. “The Marathas,” Ahmad Shah told an allied leader, “are the thorn
of Hindostan.” Now “by one effort we get this thorn out of our sides for
ever.”** Both sides courted the allegiance of Shujau-d Daula, the ruler
of Oudh in northern India, who, if he sided with the Marathas, could
have impeded the passage of Ahmad Shah’s forces into the heart of In-
dia. Shujau-d Daula, like the Marathas, was Indian, and Ahmad Shah
Durrani and his forces were Afghan. But Shujau-d Daula was a Muslim,
not a Hindu, and sided with Ahmad Shah.

274 The History or Jinan: FRoM MunamMMap TO ISIS

Egging them on was the Indian Sufi Shah Wali Allah, a popular
Islamic revivalist of the period who exhorted Muslims to take up the
sword of jihad:

It is the general authority to undertake the establishment
of religion through the revival of religious sciences, the
establishment of the pillars of Islam, the organization of
jihad and its related functions of maintenance of armies,
financing the soldiers, and allocation of their rightful por-
tions from the spoils of war, administration of justice, en-
forcement of [the limits ordained by Allah, including the
punishment for crimes (4udud)], elimination of injustice,
and enjoining good and forbidding evil, to be exercised on

behalf of the Prophet...®

Shah Wali Allah had an extremely elastic interpretation of the Qur’an’s
dictum that “there is no compulsion in religion” (2:256), arguing that
forcing infidels to accept Islam was an act of mercy toward them:

It is no mercy to them to stop at intellectually establishing
the truth of Religion to them. Rather, true mercy towards
them is to compel them so that Faith finds a way to their
minds despite themselves, It is like a bitter medicine ad-
ministered to a sick man. Moreover, there can be no com-
pulsion without eliminating those who are a source of great
harm or aggression, or liquidating their force, and capturing
their riches, so as to render them incapable of posing any
challenge to Religion. Thus their followers and progeny are
able to enter the faith with free and conscious submission.”

Reading Islamic history, Shah Wali Allah saw the action of Allah, and he
exhorted Muslims of his own day to enable the deity to act anew:

Jihad made it possible for the early followers of Islam from
the Muhajirun and the Ansar to be instrumental in the entry
of the Quraysh and the people around them into the fold of
Islam, Subsequently, God destined that Mesopotamia and
Syria be conquered at their hands. Later on it was through

CHAPTER EIGHT 275

the Muslims of these areas that God made the empires of
the Persians and Romans to be subdued. And again, it was
through the Muslims of these newly conquered realms that
God actualized the conquests of India, Turkey and Sudan.
In this way, the benefits of jihad multiply incessantly, and it
becomes, in that respect, similar to creating an endowment,
building inns and other kinds of recurring charities...

Jihad is an exercise replete with tremendous benefits
for the Muslim community, and it is the instrument of
jihad alone that can bring about their victory.... The su-
premacy of his Religion over all other religions cannot be
realized without jihad and the necessary preparation for it,
including the procurement of its instruments. Therefore, if
the Prophet's followers abandon jihad and pursue the tails
of cows [that is, become farmers} they will soon be over-
come by disgrace, and the people of other religions will

overpower them.”!

Shah Wali Allah accordingly wrote to Ahmad Shah Durrani: “We be-
seech you in the name of the Prophet to fight a jihad against the infidels
of this region. This would entitle you to great rewards before God the
Most High and your name would be included in the list of those who
fought for jihad for His sake. As far as worldly gains are concerned, in-
calculable booty would fall into the hands of the Islamic gazis [warriors]
and the Muslims would be liberated frorn their bonds.” The Afghan
jihadis were able to pass into India without difficulty, and as the Maratha
commander Sadashivrao Bhau put it, “The cup is now full to the brim
and cannot hold another drop.””

The Marathas had to drink that cup in 1761 at Panipat, just north of
Delhi, the site of two earlier pivotal battles that established and secured
Mughal rule. Ahmad Shah Durrani (with Shah Wali Allah present) de-
feated them decisively and proved to the world that the Mughal Empire
was only a shadow of what it had once been; the Afghan warriors routed
the Hindus and destroyed the Maratha army. The Marathas were forced
to withdraw from a good part of the territories they controlled. Ahmad

276 Ture History or JiIBADS, From MunamaMap ro ISIS

Shah Durrani wanted to press forward and conquer all of India, bringing
it once again under Islamic rule, but was stopped by a mutiny among his
soldiers, forcing him to return to Afghanistan.”

In his absence, the Marathas were able to regroup and hold on to
power in much of central India, with two Muslim kingdoms in south-
ern India. At this point, however, came a challenge to both Hindu and
Muslim Indian rulers, which neither group proved able to withstand: the
British colonialists. In 1765, the Mughal emperor Shah Alam I] gave the
East India Company the right to collect tax revenues in Bengal, which
made the British the effective rulers of the area; trom there they expand-
ed their holdings until bv 1820, most of India was under their control.

The presence and hegemony of the British presented the Muslim
clerics of India with a question that had not previously been answered,
as there had never before been occasion to consider it: was land that
had previously been ruled by Muslims, but was now under the mule of
infidels but with a substantial population of Muslims living there (as
opposed to Spain, from which the Muslims had been expelled), dar a/-
Islam (the house of Islam) or dar a/-haré (the house of war)? If India was
still the house of Islam, jihad could not legitimately be waged against
the British, but if it had become part of the house of war by dint of the
British rule, it could.

A prominent Muslim cleric, Shah Abd al-Aziz, issued a fatwa in
1803 to answer this question. In doing so, he relied upon the idea that
jihad is not necessarily always to be carried out by leaders of Muslim
states or other polities, but when a Muslim land is attacked, jihad be-
comes the responsibility of every individual Muslim. In his fatwa, he
lamented that in Delhi,

.. the mam al-Muslimin {leader of the Muslims] wields no
authority at all whereas the authority of the leaders of the
Christians is enforced without any trouble. By the enforce-
ment of the rules of unbelief is meant that unbelievers can
act on their own authority in governing and dealing with
the subjects, in collecting land-tax, tolls, tithes, customs
and excises, in punishing highway robbers and thieves, in
settling disputes and punishing crimes. It is true that cer-
tain Islamic rules like those regarding the congregational

CHuarpter Esour 277

prayers of Friday and the festivals, the call for prayer and
the slaughter of cows are not being interfered with. This,
however, is because the essence of these things is of no value
to them, for they demolish mosques without any scruples
and Moslems or dhimmis can only enter this city or its sur-
roundings by asking aman [protection] from them.”

This situation was intolerable for believers in a religion that mandat-
ed that unbelievers be subject to them. Resistance to British rule grew
among Muslims until finally in 1821, Sayyid Ahmad Barelvi began a
movement known as The Way of Muhammad (Tariqa-i Muhammad).
Barelvi exhorted the Muslims to take up the jihad once again: “One
should know,” he wrote, “that jihad is an advantageous and beneficial in-
stitution. Mankind derives benefits from its advantages in various ways,
just like rain, the advantages of which are imparted upon both plants,
animals and men.””

Barelvi promised that if Muslims waged jihad, they would receive “the
blessings of heaven,” including “timely downpour of rain, abundant vege-
tation, growth of profits and trade, absence of calamities and pestilences,
growth of wealth and presence of men of learning and perfection.””

The idea that jihadis would be rewarded in this life was thoroughly
Qur’anic. At one point in the Muslim holy book, Allah chastises a group
of unbelievers and adds: “if they repent, it is better for them; but if they
turn away, Allah will punish them with a painful punishment in this
world and the Hereafter.” (9:74) One can avoid the painful punishment
in this world by repenting and doing Allah's will, which, of course, in-
cludes jihad. Allah tells the unbelievers, “already there has been for you a
sign in the two armies which met” at Badr, “one fighting in the cause of
Allah and another of disbelievers” (3:10). The sign is that Allah blesses
those who do his will and punishes those who do not, in this world. At
Badr, “Allah had certainly fulfilled His promise to you when you were
killing the enemy by His permission until when you lost courage and fell
to disputing about the order and disobeyed after he had shown you that
which you love.” (3:152)

Sayyid Ahmad wanted to drive the British from India but knew
that his movement, although it was gaining a large following, had no
chance of doing that. So instead, in 1826, he declared jihad against the

278 Tue History or Jinan: From MunamMMaApb To ISIS

Sikhs who ruled in northwestern India, close to the Afghan border. In
1831, he was killed in a battle against the Sikhs at Balakot, just north
of Islamabad. That same year, Titu Mir, another Tarigqa-i Muhammadi
leader, was killed as the jihadis battled the British army in West Bengal.
In 1857, the British captured Delhi and put an end to the Mughal
Empire. Although there was hardly any Mughal Empire to conquer by
that point, this was the official end of a thousand years of Islamic rule in
India, and confirmation of the fact that India had now completely lost
its independence. There was, accordingly, a large-scale uprising against
British rule in India in which not only Muslims but Hindus also par-
ticipated. Nonetheless, in the course of it, Tariqa-1 Muhammadi clerics
issued fatwas justifying armed jihad against the colonial rulers. Tariga-i
Muhammadi continued to wage jihad against the British until 1883,
when the British army finally put a complete stop to its activities.”
There was never, however, a major jihadi uprising against the Brit-
ish in India, in large part because many Islamic authorities held that no
such jihad was justified. The w/ama (Islamic scholars) of northern India
stated: “The Musalmens here are protected by the Christians, and there
is no Jihad in a country where protection is afforded, as the absence of
protection and liberty between Musalmens and Infidels is essential in a
religious war and that condition does not exist here. Besides it is neces-
sary that there should be a probability of victory to Musalman and glory
to the Indian. If there be no such probability, the Jihad is unlawful.””
This was not just a prudential directive but an element of Islamic
law. A manual of Islamic law dictates that “jihad is personally obligatory
upon all those present in the battle lines,” but that a Muslim may leave
the field of battle “if the opposing non-Muslim army is more than twice
the size of the Muslim force.”™ This did not efface the jihad imperative
entirely, for the Muslims were to work to gain strength in order to fight
more effectively later; but if the odds were prohibitive, Muslims were not
obligated to walk into certain death. And so the Muslims in India, faced
with the overwhelming might of the British imperial forces, for the most
part did not wage jihad.
In the same vein, the Muhammadan Literary Society of Calcutta
even went so far as to say that if some Muslims in India began to wage
jihad, other Muslims would be obliged to fight with the British against

Cuarter Eicut 279

them: “If anyone were to wage war against the Ruling Powers of this
Country, British India, such war would be rightly pronounced rebellion;
and rebellion is strictly forbidden by Muhammadan Law. Therefore such
war will likewise be unlawful; and in case any one should wage war, the
Muhammadan subjects would be bound to assist their Rulers, and, in
conjunction with their Rulers, to fight with such rebels.”2!

Likewise, the nineteenth-century Indian Muslim reformer Sayyid
Ahmad Khan determined that “an Infidel Government in which the
Mahomedans enjoy every sort of peace and security, discharge their
religious duties with perfect freedom, and which is connected with a
Mahomedan Government by treaty, is not Dar-ul-Islam, because it is
a Non-Mahomedan Government, but we may call it so as regards the
peace and religious freedom which the Muslims enjoy under its protec-
tion; nor is it Dar-ul-Harb, because the treaty existing between it and the
Moslem Government makes Jihad against it unlawful."

The idea that Muslims must obey a non-Muslim ruler who was not
interfering with their practice of Islam came from Muhammad himeelf,
who is depicted in a 4adith mandating obedience to rulers in all cases
except when a ruler called upon a Muslim to sin:

It is obligatory upon a Muslim that he should listen [to the
ruler appointed over him] and obey him whether he likes it
or not, except that he is ordered to do a sinful thing. If he is
ordered to do a sinful act, a Muslim should neither listen to

him nor should he obey his orders."

Ultimately, in a non-Muslim state this put the Muslim population on a
collision course with the rulers, for Islamic law mandates the submission
and subjugation of the unbelievers, and so ultimately, nonenforcement
of that subjugation is a sinful act that the Muslim population cannot
tolerate. But this did not come to a head in British India.

Nonetheless, British colonialism increased Muslim anger, as Islam
no longer dominated. Indian politician Muhammad Yusuf asked the
British on May 3, 1883, for specifically Muslim representation in the
raj’s government: “But it would be an advantage and more fit recognition
of the claims of the Muslim population if provision could be made in the
bill for the election of Muslims by reserving a certain number of mem-

280 Tur History oF Jinap: From MunaMMAb ‘to ISIS

bership for that community.”!4 Sayyid Ahmad Khan articulated why in
1888 when he declared that Muslims and Hindus in India were two na-
tions that were at war with one another, and could never coexist in peace.

Indian Muslim politician Rahimtulla Mahomed Sayani explained
why this was so in 1896: “Before the advent of the British in India, the
Muslims were the rulers of the country. The rulers and their chiefs were
Muslims, so were the great landlords and officials. The court language
was their own [Persian was the official language of India till 1842]...
The Hindus were in awe of them. By a stroke of misfortune, the Mus-
lims had to abdicate their position and descend to the level of their Hin-
du fellow-countrymen. The Muslims resented the treatment.”

That resentment would come to a head in the twentieth century.

IV. JIHAD AGAINST THE COLONIAL
POWERS

While Muslims in India debated over whether jihad against the British
was justified under Islamic law, Muslims under colonial rule elsewhere
were not so hesitant. In 1830, the French invaded Algiers and defeated
an Ottoman army. Almost immediately, a Muslim leader named Ahmed
Bey declared jihad against the French and battled them for seven years
until the French army forced him to flee into the desert.

An Islamic revival movement, the Qadiriyyah, also pursued the ji-
had against the French, and was so strong that in 1834 the French agreed
to a treaty with its leader, Abd al-Qadir, recognizing his authority in
western Algeria. But in accord with the dictates of Islamic law, that say
treaties can be concluded with infidels only when the Muslims are weak
and need time to gain strength, and can be broken when they are no
longer useful, Abd al-Qadir soon resumed the jihad against the French,
and concluded a new, more favorable agreement with them in 1837.1

Abd al-Qadir lamented “the serious and distressed situation in the
land of Algiers, that has become a place where the crows of unbelief
slaughter [the believers], since the enemy of the Religion attempts to
subject and to enslave the Moslems, sometimes by means of the sword
and sometimes by means of political intrigues.” Resolved to end this,

CHAPTER EIGHT 281

he continued expanding the territory under his control, even writing to
the French King Louis Philippe in 1839 to protest French encroachment
upon what he said they had recognized as his territory. Because of this
violation of the agreement, he said, he had no choice but to wage jihad
against the French once again. Finally, the French had enough of it and
pursued Abd al-Qadir vigorously, capturing him in 1847 and impris-
oning him in France for five years. When he was released, he did not
resume his jihad.'** Others did, however. It wasn’t until 1871 that French
rule in Algiers was fully established.

The Mahdi Revolt

As if all this weren’t enough, there was more coming for the Ottomans
in the North African domains they nominally ruled. In 1881, the Suda-
nese Sufi sheikh Muhammad Ahmad proclaimed himself the Mahdi,
the savior figure of Islamic apocalyptic literature. Muhammad himself,
he announced, had chosen him for this role:

The eminent lord [the Prophet Muhammad], on whom be
blessing and peace, several times informed me that I am
the Mahdi, the expected one, and [appointed] me [as} suc-
cessor to himself, on whom he blessing and peace, to sit
on the throne, and [as successors] to their excellencies the
four {“Rightly-Guided Caliphs” (4i/afah)] and Princes [of
the Faith].... And he gave me the sword of victory of His
Excellency [the Prophet Muhammad] on whom be bless-
ing and peace; and it was made known to me that none of
either race, human or jzmm, can conquer him who has it....
He ordered me [to take my exile [Aijrah)] to Jebel Kadeer
close to Masat, and he commanded me to write thence to
all entrusted with public offices. I wrote thus to the Emirs
and Sheikhs of religion, and the wicked denied [my mis-
sion], but the righteous believed.... this is what the emi-
nent lord {the Prophet Muhammad], on whom be blessing
and peace, said to me: “He who doubts that thou art the
Mahdi has blasphemed God and His Prophet.”...If you
have understood this, we order all the chosen ones to [make

282 Tre History or Jinap: From MUHAMMAD TO ISIS

their Azjrah] unto us for the jihad...in the cause of God, to
the nearest town, because God Most High has said, “slay
the infidels who are nearest to you.”...Fear God and join
the righteous, and help one another in righteousness, and in
the fear of God and in the jidad...in the cause of God, and
stand firm within the boundaries of God, for he who trans-
eresses those boundaries will injure himself. Know that all
things are in the hand of God. Leave all to Him and rely on
Him. He who makes God his support has been guided into
the straight way. Peace [be with you].’”

The Mahdi also declared: “Cease to pay taxes to the infidel Turks and
let everyone who finds a Turk kill him, for the Turks are infidels.”" He
declared jihad against the Ottomans and the Egyptians, and enacted a
series of Messianic decrees reminiscent of the Qarmatians, who a thou-
sand years before had forsworn mosque worship and the pilgrimage to
Mecca in anticipation of the imminent arrival of the Mahdi.

Now Muhammad Ahmad, in the role of the Mahdi, likewise began
to alter what orthodox Muslims considered the unchangeable aspects
of Islam. He revised the profession of faith from “There is no god but
Allah and Muhammad is his prophet” to “There is no god but Allah and
Muhammad Ahmad is the Mahdi of Allah and the representative of his
prophet.”"'' He directed that zakaz, Islamic almsgiving, be paid only to
his movement, and replaced the az, the pilgrimage to Mecca, as a pillar
of Islam with jihad.

The Mahdi called upon Muslims around the world to emigrate to
his domains for the sake of Allah, after the manner of Muhammad’s
Ayrah from Mecca to Medina. He wrote to Muslim leaders:

It is evident that times have changed and that the Sunnah
has been abandoned. No one with faith and intelligence will
approve of that. Therefore, it would be better that he leave
his affairs and his country in order to establish the Religion
and the Sunnah...Emigrating with the Religion is oblig-
atory on the strength of the Book and the Sunnah. Allah
has said: “Oh ye who have believed, respond to Allah and

CHAPTER E1lcut 283

to the messenger when He calls you to what will give you
life.” [Qur’an 8:24] The prophet has said: “He who flees
with his religion from one territory to another, even if it is
[only the distance of] an inch, will be worthy of Paradise
and be the companion of his father Ibrahim, Allah’s bosom
friend, and of His prophet Muhammad.” And [there are]
similar Koranic verses and Traditions... If you understand
this, [know then that] I have ordered all those [of you] who
are legally capable, to emigrate to us for the sake of jihad
in the way of Allah, or to the country that is nearest to
you, on the strength of Allah’s words: “Oh ye who have be-
lieved, fight the unbelievers who are near to you.” [Qur’an
9:123]...If you understand this, then: onward to the jihad
in His way.'!

The Mahdi proceeded to wage that jihad against the Egyptians, un-
til finally the Egyptian 2Aedive Tewfik became determined to kill this
imposter and put down this uprising. But the Mahdi was popular, and
Tewfik and the Egyptian rulers, to say nothing of the Ottomans, were
not. Thus, for help in finding and killing the Mahdi, Tewfik turned to
the British. The Mahdi, enraged, wrote to Tewfik: “You were not right
in taking the unbelievers as patrons in preference to Allah and asking
their assistance while they were shedding the blood of the community
of Mohammed.” He quoted the Qur’an: “O ye who have believed, do
not choose Jews or Christians as patrons, they are patrons to each other;
whoever makes patrons of them is one of them.” (5:51) He exhorted
the Ahedive to “declare yourself above being permanently the captive of
Allah’s enemies and do not lead to perdition those of the community of
Mohammed that are with you.”'%

The £hedive was unmoved. Ottoman Islamic scholars issued a num-
ber of fatwas refuting Muhammad Ahmad’s claim to be the Mahdi, and
charging that he was illegitimately killing fellow Muslims, in violation of
the Qur’anic prohibition against doing so (4:92). These fatwas had little
effect; the Ottomans and the Egyptians were hoping that the British
would finish the Mahdi off for good.

284 Tir Hisrory of Jinap: From MuwHAMMaAD ro ISIS

Getting help from the British came at a price. Anti-English riots
broke out in Egypt in June 1882. Ahmad Urabi, the &4ed:ves minister
of war, rebelled against the £4edive’s pro-English policy and led an army
against the British, only to be condemned by the Ottoman sultan and
the Ahedive. But in July 1882, however, Egyptian ulama published a call
for jihad, calling for support of Urabi’s army and reminding Muslims:
“Those who sacrifice themselves in support of their Religion will attain
success and acceptance [with Allah].”!° But Urabi was defeated, and
British rule in Egypt secured. The British army could now turn its at-
tention to the Mahdi.

Calling in the British imperial army against the Mahdi was akin
to calling in the police to swat a fly, and yet the fly won. To be sure, the
British didn’t commit nearly as much as they could have, and the Mah-
di’s forces far outnumbered those of the British, but the followers of the
Mahdi still took the crushing defeat of the British at El-Obeid in the
Sudan in 1883 as a sign that Muhammad Ahmad was indeed the Mahdi,
and Allah was blessing their jihad, as he had blessed the pious Muslims
at Badr. To ensure that they would not lose that divine favor, which came
only as a reward for obedience, the Mahdi issued a sweeping decree after

El-Obeid:

Let all show penitence before Allah, and abandon all bad
and forbidden habits, such as degrading acts of the flesh,
the drinking of wine and smoking tobacco, lying, bear-
ing false witness, disobedience to parents, brigandage, the
non-restitution of goods to others, the clapping of hands,
dancing, improper signs with the eyes, tears and lamenta-
tions at the bed of the dead, slanderous language, calumny,
and the company of strange women. Clothe your women
in a decent way and let them be careful not to speak to un-
known persons. All those who do not pay attention to these
principles disobey God and His Prophet, and they shall be
punished in accordance with the law. Say your prayers at
the prescribed hours. Give the tenth of your goods, handing
it to our Prince, Sheikh Mansour [whom the Mahdi had

CHaPTER EtGout 285

made governor of El Obeid] in order that he may forward
it to the treasury of Islam. Adore God, and hate not each
other, but assist each other to do good."

Or else. The Mahdi endorsed the harshest Sharia punishments for
transgressors. This was because, he said, “well-being with Allah can only
be achieved by following the Religion, by reviving the Sunnah of His
prophet and His community, by suppressing these recent innovations
[4ida} and errors and by turning repentantly to the Exalted One in all
situations.”''’ Even reading a book other than the Qur'an or hadith col-
lections could cost a man his life. And, for a time, it did appear as if
strict adherence to Sharia, as Allah had promised, would result in earthly
success, In 1884, the British sent to the Sudan the renowned general Sir
Charles “Chinese” Gordon. Gordon himself was less than enthusiastic
about fighting to secure control of this barren and desolate region, writ-
ing: “No one who has ever lived in the Sudan can escape the reflection
“What a useless possession is this land!’”""*

Nonetheless, he did all he could, only to find himself betrayed by
his nominal allies. In March 1884, the Mahdi’s army attacked Egyptian
troops at the oasis of Halfaya, near Khartoum. Gordon set out to retake
Halfaya from the Mahdi; as the British approached, the Egyptians inside
the oasis warned the Mahdi’s troops to retreat or face annihilation. The
Mahdi’s forces, cautious considering Gordon's reputation, complied, and
began a retreat, only to be suddenly and inexplicably called back by two
Egyptian officers. The rest of the Egyptian troops, seeing this betray-
al, fled in panic. Gordon wrote in his diary: “Sixty horsemen defeated
two thousand men.”!"? He questioned the Egyptian officers, who insist-
ed that they were encouraging the Mahdists to surrender, not betraying
their own side. Gordon, however, was unconvinced. Were these followers
of the Mahdi within his own ranks? The possibility could not be dis-
counted. He had them executed.

The following year, flush with these unexpected victories, the Mah-
di’s army besieged Khartoum. Finding a way into the city, the Mahdists
found Gordon and cried out, “O cursed one, your time has come!”!”°
They beheaded Gordon and either killed or sold into slavery thirty thou-
sand men, women, and children.

r

286 Tue History or JindAn: From MunamMaAp To ISIS

Again, the Mahdi and his followers had won a victory that shocked
the world and reinforced the idea among them that Allah was blessing
them and would lead them to final jihad victories over the Ottoman
Empire, the British Empire, and infidels everywhere.

Yet this great jihad was never even to get past Khartoum. In June
1885, the Mahdi died suddenly and mysteriously. Although he contin-
ued to be a revered figure, after his death his movement was a spent
force, unable to continue without his charismatic leadership. The princi-
pal lesson of the Mahdi revolt that like-minded Muslims carried into the
twentieth century was that the Ottomans, Egyptians, and British could
not defeat a determined group of pious, believing Muslims. The Otto-
man Empire was truly, as it was often called, “the Sick Man of Europe,”
and its end was nigh, but the British Empire was at its zenith and had
not been able to defeat the Mahdi.

So while there were currents within the decaying Ottoman Empire
that were beginning to conclude that the empire’s problems stemmed
from its adherence to Islam, numerous Muslims elsewhere were con-
cluding that the Ottomans’ trouble was that they weren't Islamic enough,
and that all that one needed for success against even the great powers of
the world was a fanatical adherence to the will of Allah.

By the end of the nineteenth century, the idea that success came
from obeying the will of Allah was decidedly in eclipse. The British had
won control of India and Egypt, ending one long-lived Islamic empire
(that of the Mughals) and contributing to the near-demise of another
(the Ottomans), even while entering into alliances of convenience with
it. As the twentieth century dawned, it looked as if, aside from a few
fanatics such as the Mahdi, the era of jihad had been consigned to the
dustbin of history.

PDF created by Rajesh Arya - Gujarat

CHAPTER NINE

RESURGENCE

Jihad in the Twentieth Century

I. THE END OF THE CALIPHATE

The Age of Defensive Jihad

The Ottoman Empire was in its death throes as the twentieth century
began, and the days of Islamic states’ declaring jihad against non-Muslim
neighbors were drawing to a close. Sunni law authorized the caliph to
declare only offensive jihad, and the caliph was weak and getting weaker.
But that is not the only form of jihad warfare against infidels: Islamic
law stipulates that when a Muslim land is attacked, defensive jihad be-
comes obligatory for every individual Muslim. The Islamic legal manual
Rehance of the Traveller stipulates that “the caliph makes war upon Jews,
Christians, and Zoroastrians...until they become Muslim or else pay the
non-Muslim poll tax.”' However, “when non-Muslims invade a Mus-
lim country or near to one,” jihad “becomes personally obligatory upon
the inhabitants of that country, who must repel the non-Muslims with
whatever they can.”

This applies not just to the Muslims in that country but to all Mus-
lims. Ibn Taymiyya considered it an absolute: “Tf the enemy wants to at-
tack the Muslims, then repelling him becomes a duty for all those under
attack and for the others in order to help them. God, He is exalted, has
said: ‘Yet if they ask you for help, for religion's sake, it is your duty to help
them.’ (K[oran] 8:72) In the same vein the Prophet has ordered Mus-
lims to help fellow Muslims. The assistance, which is obligatory both for

288 THe History oF Jinan: From MuwnammMap To ISIS

the regular professional army and for others, must be given, according
to everybody’s possibilities, either in person, by fighting on foot or on
horseback, or through financial contributions, be they small or large.”*

The twentieth century was the age of defensive jihad. Because of
the universal character of this responsibility and the absence, after 1924,
of a caliph, the twentieth century saw, for the first time on a large scale,
individuals and small groups mounting jihad attacks in service of the
larger jihad agenda, not as part of an Islamic army.

Jihad Against Colonial Rule

In October 1911, an Italian army invaded Libya and confronted a vastly
smaller Ottoman force there. The Italians encountered far greater resis-
tance than they expected, however, because the Ottomans got help from a
revivalist Muslim group known as the Sanusis, after its founder, Muham-
mad ibn Ali as-Sanusi. Its leader, al-Sayyid Ahmad al-Sharif, declared
jihad against the Italians in January 1912, calling upon “all Moslems es-
pecially those in such countries as have been occupied by the enemies of
Religion” to remember the requirements of defensive jihad and do “what
is incumbent upon you, namely jihad against the enemies, giving them a
rough time, establishing Islam, assisting the Religion and its adherents,
raising Allah’s Word and subjugating unbelief and the unbelievers.”*

Al-Sharif’s call was repeated by Islamic authorities worldwide, but
nonetheless, the Italians did finally defeat the Ottomans and the Sanusis
in October 1912. Al-Sharif did not give up. In 1914, he wrote to the
Muslims in Libya: “How can you live with vipers and scorpions and with
those who openly profess polytheism and the Trinity and who destroy
the mihrabs {niches in the wall of a mosque showing the direction to
Mecca for prayer]. How can the light of the sun of Islam shine over you
when the Banner of the Cross and the Darkness flutters among you?”®

The Sanusis never gave up, even defeating the Italians in battle in
April 1915. They continued their jihad against the Italians for decades
thereafter, and after World War II began to work with the United Nations
toward Libyan independence. In 1951, the Sanusi leader Prince Muham-
mad Idris bin Muhammad al-Mahdi as-Sanusi became King Idris I of
Libya; he was deposed in a coup by Muammar Gaddafi in 1969.

CuHuarrer NINE 289

The Ottoman Empire’s Death Throes

The Ottoman Empire lost Bosnia to Austria-Hungary in 1908, parts
of Greece to the independent Greek state and Rhodes to Italy in 1912,
and Albania, Macedonia, and Thrace in 1913. By the time World War I
began, the Ottoman domains in Europe that remained were the city of
Edirne and the portion of East Thrace that surrounded it.

During the war, the Ottomans joined the Central Powers against
their archenemy Russia, along with Russia’s allies, Britain and France.
The sultan Mehmet V declared that the war was a jihad, issuing a fatwa
answering yes to this question:

When it occurs that enemies attack the Islamic world, when
it has been established that they seize and pillage Islamic
countries and capture Moslem persons and when His Maj-
esty the Padishah of Islam thereupon orders the jihad in the
form of a general mobilization, has jihad then, according
to the illustrious Koran verse: ‘March out light and heavy
[hearted], and strive with goods and persons [in the way of
Allah; that will be better for you’ (K[oran] 9:41)], become
incumbent upon all Moslems in all parts of the world, be
they young or old, on foot or mounted, to hasten to partake
in the jihad with their goods and money?

He likewise answered yes to this question:

Now that it has been established that Russia, England,
France and the governments that support them and are al-
lied to them, are hostile to the Islamic Caliphate, since their
warships and armies attack the Seat of the Islamic Caliph-
ate and the Imperial Dominions and strive (Allah forbid)
for extinguishing and annihilating the exalted light of Islam
[cf. Qur’an 9:32], is it, in this case, also incumbent upon
all Muslims that are being ruled by these governments, to
proclaim jihad against them and to actually attack them?’

290 Tre History or Jinap: From MuyammMap TO ISIS

The Armenian Genocide Continues

The Sultan’s call to jihad didn’t arouse much enthusiasm. However, the
Ottoman public hadn't lost its thirst for jihad altogether; it was just
much more enthusiastic and willing to be roused to action by denunci-
ations of the Armenians than by denunciations of the Russians, British,
and French.

As the Ottoman Empire was crumbling and there were calls for
Armenian independence, the Ottoman authorities cracked down hard.
In October 1915, Ismail Enver, the Ottoman minister of war, declared
that he planned to “solve the Greek problem during the war...in the
same way he believe[d] he solved the Armenian problem.” Rafet Bey,
an Ottoman official, said in November 1916 that “we must finish off
the Greeks as we did with the Armenians...today I sent squads to the
interior to kill every Greek on sight.”? The New York Times reported in
1915 that “both Armenians and Greeks, the two native Christian races
of Turkey, are being systematically uprooted from their homes en masse
and driven forth summarily to distant provinces, where they are scattered
in small groups among Turkish Villages and given the choice between
immediate acceptance of Islam or death by the sword or starvation.”!®

The Ottoman interior minister, Mehmet Talat Pasha, explained
to the ambassador from the United States, Henry Morgenthau, that
one reason why the Armenian genocide was proceeding was because
the Armenians had rebelled against the rule of the caliphate, thereby
transgressing against the principle that Islam must dominate and not
be dominated:

We base our objections to the Armenians on three distinct
grounds, In the first place, they have enriched themselves
at the expense of the Turks. In the second place, they are
cletermined to domineer over us and to establish a separate
state. In the third place, they have openly encouraged our
enemies. They have assisted the Russians in the Caucasus
and our failure there is largely explained by their actions.
We have therefore come to the irrevocable decision that we
shall make them powerless before this war is ended,"

Cyuarrer NING 291

Mehmet Talat Pasha also boasted to Morgenthau that the deed was al-
ready largely done:

It is no use for you to argue...we have already disposed of
three-quarters of the Armenians; there are none at all left in
Bitlis, Van, and Erzeroum. The hatred between the Turks
and the Armenians is now so intense that we have got to
finish with them. If we don’t, they will plan their revenge...
We will not have Armenians anywhere in Anatolia. They
can live in the desert but nowhere else.”

The Times of London noted somewhat later that Assyrian Christians in
what is now Iraq suffered at the hands of the Turks as well: “Telegrams
from Mesopotamia state that some 47,000 refugees largely Nestorians,
have come into the British lines after having got through the Turkish
lines. Many of these are being taken to camps near Baghdad. A further
10,000 have been absorbed in the towns of Kurdistan or are wander-
ing among the hills. These refugees have come from the Urumia region,
which was isolated during the Turkish advance in North-West Persia...
The day after this escape the Turks entered Urumia and massacred 200
unresisting people—mostly old men—while 500 Christian women are
reported to have been distributed between the Turkish troops and the
Moslem inhabitants.”"

The New York Times predicted that unless the Ottomans lost the war,
there would “soon be no more Christians in the Ottoman Empire.”"* The
Ottoman Empire did lose the war, but the de-Christianization contin-
ued, as the secular Turkish government considered a depoliticized Islam
to be essential to the Turkish national identity, and continued to perse-
cute and drive out the nation’s Christians, with the approval of Turkish
Muslim clerics who still thought in terms of jihad.

Allin all, about a million and a half Armenians were killed in the
Armenian Genocide, seven hundred thousand Greeks, and 275,000
Assyrians were killed in Ottoman territories under similar circum-
stances.'§ Christian communities that had existed since the beginning
of Christianity were wiped out. Constantinople, fifty percent Chris-
tian even in 1914, is today 99.99 percent Muslim.” Further effacing
the historical identity of the city, the secular ‘Turkish government on

292 Tue History or Jruap: From MunAMMAD TO ISIS

March 28, 1930, officially changed the name of Constantinople to
one of the names the Turks had used for centuries for the city but had
never been official: Istanbul.””

Adolf Hitler was impressed with the brutal efficiency of how the
Turks answered their “Armenian question,” and used their example, and
the world’s forgetfulness regarding this atrocity, to justify his own exter-
mination of the Poles. In August 1939, he told Wehermacht commanders:

Our strength consists in our speed and in our brutali-
ty. Genghis Khan led millions of women and children to
slaughter—with premeditation and a happy heart, History
sees in him solely the founder of a state. It’s a matter of in-
difference to me what a weak western European civilization
will say about me.

I have issued the command—and I'll have anybody who
utters but one word of criticism executed by a firing squad—
that our war aim does not consist in reaching certain lines,
but in the physical destruction of the enemy. Accordingly,
I have placed my death-head formations in readiness—for
the present only in the East—with orders to send them to
death mercilessly and without compassion, men, women, and
children of Polish derivation and language. Only thus shall
we gain the living space [Lebensraum] which we need. Who,
after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?"

The same could be said of the victims of jihad throughout history. Who,
after all, speaks of the victims of Tariq ibn Ziyad, or Mahmoud of Ghaz-
mi, or Mehmet the Conqueror, or Aurangzeb?

The Demise of the Caliphate

With the war lost, there was widespread discontent in the diminished
Ottoman domains against the Islamic leadership that had Jed the once
great empire down the road to disaster. One Turkish woman reflected the
sentiments of many when she asked, “Of what use was the Caliphate to us
during the war? We proclaimed a holy war and what good did that do?””

CHAPTER NINE 293

Kemal Ataturk, the founder of secular Turkey, agreed. The Turkish
Grand National Assembly abolished the sultanate on November 1, 1922,
but seventeen days later chose the Ottoman crown prince, Abdulmecid
IJ, to be the caliph—the first and only Ottoman caliph who was not to
be sultan of the empire. Ataturk declared: “The Caliph has no power or
position except as a nominal figurehead.”*? When the caliph dared to
ask Ataturk for an increase in his pay, Ataturk told Abdulmecid: “The
caliphate, your office, is no more than an historical relic. It has no justi-
fication for existence. It is a piece of impertinence that you should dare
write to any of my secretaries,”*!

Finally, on March 3, 1924, Ataturk abolished the caliphate altogether
and sent Abdulmecid into exile. The last caliph boarded the Orient Ex-
press, bound for Switzerland. As his train sped past Szigetvar in Hungary,
where his illustrious predecessor Suleiman the Magnificent’s heart was
buried after he died while on a jihad expedition, Abdulmecid said sadly:
“My ancestor came with a horse and flags. Now I come as an exile.”

“Islam,” said Ataturk, “this theology of an immoral Arab, is a dead
thing.” Islam wasn’t dead by any means, but the caliphate was, at least
for the time being. Almost immediately, however, Muslims began work-
ing to bring it back. Initially, they were swimming against the stream.
Ataturk’s Republic of Turkey, consciously based on Western, secular
models of governance, was an initial success. Many of the states that
were created by the British and French out of former Ottoman holdings
adopted Arab nationalist secular governments that did not implement
Sharia, such that as the twentieth century approached its midpoint, most
Muslims did not live under Islamic law.

For true believers, this was an intolerable affront to Allah, as well as
the cause of the weakness of Muslims and of Islam itself. It could not be
allowed to stand.

Il. SAUDI ARABIA

One of the principal forces making sure that it would not stand, and
that secular government would never gain a lasting foothold in Muslim
countries, was the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

294 Tue History or Jinan: From Munamman To ISIS

Exiled to Kuwait by the rival al-Rashid clan in 1891, Saudi lead-
er Abdul-Aziz ibn Saud returned in 1902, defeated the Rashidis, and
seized Riyadh.** Over the next few years, he gained control over more
and more of Arabia, alarming the Ottomans, who were too weak to do
much about it. In August 1906, Ibn Saud met with the Ottoman com-
mander Sami Pasha, only to grow enraged when Sami Pasha would not
relent on his insistence that the al-Qassim region of Arabia remain un-
der Ottoman control. Ibn Saud shouted, “If you were not my guest, I
should not spare your life,” and stormed out of the meeting.” The Ot-
toman troops, meanwhile, were short on supplies and growing weary of
the Arabian desert, which they called “Satan’s daughter.”” In November
1906, they withdrew from the area.

In 1914, the British and the Ottomans agreed to a partition of the
Arabian Peninsula, with Ibn Saud nominally the viceroy of the Ottomans
as the emir of Najd.?” When the Hashemite Hussein ibn Ali, the sharif
of Mecca, rose up against the Ottomans in 1916 with the intention of
forming an independent Arab state, the British—including Colonel T.
E. Lawrence, who came to be known as Lawrence of Arabia—supported
him. The British did not, however, support Hussein's claim to be “King
of the Arab Countries,” and did not fulfill the promises they had made
to him to support the independence of Arab lands.

Ibn Saud didn’t like the “King of the Arab Countries” title either,
and waged jihad against Hussein, eventually defeating him and driving
him out of Arabia in 1924. After consolidating his control over the Ara-
bian Peninsula, Ibn Saud proclaimed the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia on
September 18, 1932. He decreed that all laws “should correspond to
Allah's Book, the Sunna of His Prophet (Allah’s blessing be upon Him)
and the rules to which the Prophet’s Companions and the first pious
generations adhered.””?

The proclamation of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia took on geo-
political significance on March 4, 1938, when massive oil deposits were
discovered inside the kingdom.*” Other discoveries followed, and within
a few years the Saudis were exporting millions of barrels of oil every year.
As the Saudi ruling class became more and more awash in luxury, it did
not forget its Wahhabi roots. One of the chief exports of Saudi Arabia,

CHAPTER NINE 295

particularly in the aftermath of the oil crisis of 1973, when unimaginable
wealth flowed into Saudi coffers, was Wahhabi Islam.

Between 1979 and 2017, the Saudis spent more than seventy billion
dollars to finance the construction of mosques and madrasas all over
the world, and on Wahhabi literature with which to fill them.3? One of
the Wahhabis’ notable successes was in Kosovo. In the late 1990s, U.S.
president Bill Clinton backed Muslims in Kosovo in their fight for in-
dependence against Serbia. Grateful Kosovars named a street in Pristina
Bill Clinton Boulevard.” But Kosovo's pro-Americanism did not last
long, courtesy of Saudi Arabia.

Fatos Makolli, director of Kosovo's counterterrorism police, re-
counted in 2016 what happened when Saudi Wahhabis started pouring
millions of euros into Kosovo in 1999: “They promoted political Islam.
They spent a lot of money to promote it through different programs
mainly with young, vulnerable people, and they brought in a lot of Wah-
habi and Salafi literature. They brought these people closer to radical
political Islam, which resulted in their radicalization.... There is no evi-
dence that any organization gave money directly to people to go to Syria.
The issue is they supported thinkers who promote violence and jihad in
the name of protecting Islam."

A Kosovar imam named Idriz Bilalli, who opposed the Saudi influ-
ence, later declared: “This is Wahhabism coming into our society. The
first thing the Wahhabis do is to take members of our congregation, who
understand Islam in the traditional Kosovo way that we had for genera-
tions, and try to draw them away from this understanding. Once they get
them away from the traditional congregation, then they start bombard-
ing them with radical thoughts and ideas. The main goal of their activity
is to create conflict between people. This first creates division, and then
hatred, and then it can come to what happened in Arab countries, where
war starts because of these conflicting ideas.”™

After Kosovo's declaration of independence in 2008, the Saudis
sponsored the building of 240 mosques in that tiny country alone. In
those mosques, of course, they taught Wahhabism, but the Saudis were
not able simply to buy the allegiance of Kosovars or anyone else. They
spent enormous amounts of money to promote Wahbhabism, but Wah-
habism was still able to gain only footholds around the world because

296 Tue History or Jinap: From MuxnammMapb To ISTS

of its scrupulous adherence to the letter of the Qur’an and Sunnah. The
Wahhabi message resonated among Muslims because of its basis in the
teachings of the Qur’an and Muhammad.

The global result of this massive Saudi cash outlay was that in 2013,
the European Parliament identified Wahhabism as a principal source of
terrorism worldwide.** The Saudis were the chief financiers of the jihad
movements that convulsed the world beginning in the last decades of the
twentieth century.

Most of those movements were rooted in the Muslim Brotherhood.

III. THE RISE OF JIHAD MOVEMENTS

The Muslim Brotherhood:
The Qur’an and the Sword

Determined to fight Western influence and restore the caliphate,
Hasan al-Banna founded the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in 1928.
Al-Banna decried the abolition of the caliphate, which separated “the
state from religion in a country which was until recently the site of the
Commander of the Faithful.” Al-Banna characterized it as just part
of a larger “Western invasion which was armed and equipped with all
[the] destructive influences of money, wealth, prestige, ostentation,
power and means of propaganda.”*’

He saw this Western influence as all-pervasive. Al-Banna lament-
ed that “a wave of dissolution which undermined all firm beliefs, was
engulfing Egypt in the name of intellectual emancipation. This trend
attacked the morals, deeds and virtues under the pretext of personal free-
dom. Nothing could stand against this powerful and tyrannical stream of
disbelief and permissiveness that was sweeping our country.”**

Like Islamic movements going back to Ibn Tumart’s and those
before him, Al-Banna’s was a revivalist movement. In 1928, al-Banna
decried the indifference of the Egyptian elite to Islam: “What catastro-
phe has befallen the souls of the reformers and the spirit of the lead-
ers...? What calamity has made them prefer this life to the thereafter
[sic]? What has made them...consider the way of struggle [sabi/ a/-

Cnaprer Nine 297

Jthad\ too rough and difficult?”*’ When the Brotherhood was criticized
for being a political group in the guise of a religious one, al-Banna met
the challenge head-on:

We summon you to Islam, the teachings of Islam, the laws
of Islam and the guidance of Islam, and if this smacks of
“politics” in your eyes, then it is our policy. And if the one
summoning you to these principles is a “politician,” then we
are the most respectable of men, God be praised, in poli-
tics.... Islam does have a policy embracing the happiness
of this world.... We believe that Islam is an all-embracing
concept which regulates every aspect of life, adjudicating on
every one of its concerns and prescribing for it a solid and
rigorous order.”

The Brotherhood invoked the Qur’'an—‘“Fight them until there is no fit-
nah [sedition] and worship is for Allah” (2:193)—in exhorting Muslims
worldwide to recapture the glory days of Islam, to reestablish the caliph-
ate and once again make it into a great power. Al-Banna also insisted
that “every piece of land where the banner of Islam has been hoisted is
the fatherland of the Muslims.” In line with another Qur’anic directive,
“drive them out from where they drove you out” (2:191), the Brother-
hood urged Muslims to reconquer Spain, as well as Sicily and southern
Italy and the former Ottoman domains in the Balkans.*!

The Brotherhood grew in Egypt from 150 branches in 1936 to as
many as fifteen hundred by 1944. In 1939 al-Banna referred to “100,000
pious youths from the Muslim Brothers from all parts of Egypt,” and by
1944 membership was estimated as being between one hundred thou-
sand and five hundred thousand.” By 1937 the group had expanded be-
yond Egypt, setting up “several branches in Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Pal-
estine, Syria, Lebanon, and Morocco, and one each in Bahrain, Hadra-
mawt, Hyderabad, Djibouti, and even in Paris.”

Thus many thousands of Muslims dispersed around the world heard
al-Banna’s call to “prepare for jihad and be lovers of death.”* The Mus-
lim Brotherhood’s newspaper explained: “No justice will be dealt and
no peace maintained on earth until the rule of the Koran and the bloc
of Islam are established. Moslem unity must be established. Indonesia,

298 Tur History oF JiHAD: From MurtamMapD To ISIS

Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Trans-Jordan,
Palestine, Saudi-Arabia, Yemen, Egypt, Sudan, Tripoli, Tunis, Algeria
and Morocco all form one bloc, the Moslem bloc, which God has prom-
ised to grant victory, saying: ‘We shall grant victory unto the faithful.’
But this is impossible to reach other than through the way of Islam.”
Al-Banna told his followers: “Islam is faith and worship, a country and
a citizenship, a religion and a state. It is spirituality and hard work. It is
a Qur’an and a sword.”

Islam, the Answer to the World’s Problems

The Armenian-American journalist Arthur Derounian met al-Banna in
1948. Writing later under the name John Roy Carlson, Derounian de-
scribed al-Banna as “a short, squat ratty-faced man with puffed cheeks
and fleshy nose.... We sat in the shade, under the shield showing the
Koran above a pair of crossed swords.... I disliked him instantly and
thoroughly. He was the most loathsome man I had yet met in Cairo.””
Al-Banna told Derounian: “The Koran should be Egypt’s constitution,
for there is no law higher than Koranic law. We seek to fulfill the lofty,
human message of Islam which has brought happiness and fulfillment
to mankind in centuries past. Ours is the highest ideal, the holiest cause
and the purest way. Those who criticize us have fed from the tables of
Europe. They want to live as Europe has taught them—to dance, to
drink, to revel, to mix the sexes openly and in public.”

Sayyid Qutb, the Muslim Brotherhood’s great theorist, shared that
puritanical revulsion. He sharpened his distaste for the West while liv-
ing in the United States from November 1948 to August 1950.% Mov-
ing to Greeley, Colorado, he was impressed by the number of churches
in the city but not with the piety they engendered: “Nobody goes to
church as often as Americans do.... Yet no one is as distant as they are
from the spiritual aspect of religion.” He was thoroughly scandalized
by a dance after an evening service at a local church: “The dancing
intensified.,.. The hall swarmed with legs.... Arms circled arms, lips
met lips, chests met chests, and the atmosphere was full of love.”%
The pastor further scandalized Qutb by dimming the lights, creating
“a romantic, dreamy effect,” and playing a popular record of the day:

Cuarrer NINE 299

“Baby, It’s Cold Outside.”*' He regarded American popular music in
general with a gimlet eye: “Jazz is the favorite music [of America]. It is
a type of music invented by [American] Blacks to please their primitive
tendencies and desire for noise.”

Ultimately he concluded: “I fear that when the wheel of life has
turned and the file on history has closed, America will not have con-
tributed anything.” He didn’t find American prosperity to be matched
by a corresponding wealth of spirit. “J am afraid that there is no cor-
relation between the greatness of the American material civilization
and the men who created it.... In both feeling and conduct the Amer-
ican is primitive [dida’a}.”°?

Qutb's influential book Milestones positioned Islam as the true
source of societal and personal order, as opposed to both capitalism and
Communism. “Mankind today is on the brink of a precipice,” he asserted
in this Cold War-era manifesto, “not because of the danger of complete
annihilation which is hanging over its head—this being just a symptom
and not the real disease—but because humanity is devoid of those vital
values which are necessary not only for its healthy development but also
for its real progress.” Perhaps with his time in America in mind, he went
on: “Even the Western world realizes that Western civilization is unable
to present any healthy values for the guidance of mankind. It knows that
it does not possess anything which will satisfy its own conscience and
justify its existence.”

Qutb concluded: “It is essential for mankind to have new leader-
ship!”"** That new leadership would come from Islam. To Qutb, what
the Muslim wma needed was a restoration of Islam in its fullness and
purity, including all the rules of the Sharia for regulating society. “If we
look at the sources and foundations of modern ways of living, it becomes
clear that the whole world is steeped in Jahihtyyah [Ignorance of the Di-
vine guidance], and all the marvelous material comforts and high-level
inventions do not diminish this ignorance. This JaAz/tyyah is based on
rebellion against God’s sovereignty on earth. It transfers to man one of
the greatest attributes of God, namely sovereignty, and makes some men
lords over others,”

He advanced Islam as “a challenge to all kinds and forms of sys-

tems which are based on the concept of the sovereignty of man; in oth-

300 Tne History of Jittap: From MuniamMMmap To ISIS

er words, where man has usurped the Divine attribute. Any system in
which the final decisions are referred to human beings, and in which the
sources of all authority are human, deifies human beings by designating
others than God as lords over men.”

Qutb taught that jihad was necessary in order to establish Sharia.
“The establishing of the dominion of God on earth, the abolishing of
the dominion of man, the taking away of sovereignty from the usurper
to revert it to God, and the bringing about of the enforcement of the
Divine Law [Sharia]...and the abolition of man-made laws cannot be
achieved only through preaching. Those who have usurped the authority
of God and are oppressing God's creatures are not going to give up their
power merely through preaching; if it had been so, the task of estab-
lishing God’s religion in the world would have been very easy for the
Prophets of God! This is contrary to the evidence from the history of
the Prophets and the story of the struggle of the true religion, spread
over gencrations,””’

Qutb emphasized Islam’s universal character and call: “This religion
is not merely a declaration of the freedom of the Arabs, nor is its message
confined to the Arabs. It addresses itself to the whole of mankind, and its
sphere of work is the whole earth.... This religion wants to bring back
the whole world to its Sustainer and free it from servitude to anyone
other than God.””*

Al-Banna likewise explained: “We want an Arabian United States
with a Caliphate at its head and every Arab state subscribing whole-
heartedly to the laws of the Koran. We must return to the Koran, which
preaches the good life, which forbids us to take bribes, to cheat, to kill
one’s brother. The laws of the Koran are suitable for all men at all times
to the end of the world. This is the day and this is the time when the
world needs Islam most.”*?

To impress upon Egypt its need for Islam, the Brotherhood attacked
Jews who lived there and assassinated several leading officials, includ-
ing several judges. Al-Banna ordered one young member of the Broth-
erhood, a twenty-three-year-old student named Abdel Magid Ahmed
Hassan, to do his duty before Allah—which, a sheikh explained to the
young man, involved killing “the enemies of Islam and of Arabism.”
Hassan agreed to murder anyone al-Banna told him to, and so on De-

CHapter NINE 301

cember 28, 1948, the young man gunned down Egypt’s prime minister,
Mahmoud El Nokrashy Pasha.” Al-Banna was himself assassinated on
February 12, 1949, most likely in a revenge killing.*' Qutb, hospitalized
in Washington, D.C. for a respiratory ailment in February 1949, claimed
implausibly that a radio broadcast of the news of al-Banna’s assassination
set the hospital staff to open rejoicing.”

Egypt's Arab Socialist ruler, Gamel Abdel Nasser, had no patience
for the Brotherhood, and had Qutb imprisoned and tortured. Qutb
wrote trom his prison cell: “The whole of Egypt is imprisoned.... I was
arrested despite my immunity as a judge, without an order of arrest...
my sole crime being my critique of the non-application of the Sha-
ria.”*’ As his trial began, he declared: “The time has come for a Muslim
to give his head in order to proclaim the birth of the Islamic move-
ment.”°* When he was sentenced to death, he exclaimed: “Thank God!
I performed jihad for fifteen years until I earned this martyrdom.”® He
was executed in 1966.

IV. THE JIHAD IN ISRAEL

Hajj Amin al-Husseini

One of the Muslim Brotherhood’s foremost friends and supporters was
Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem, who for years before the
establishment of the state of Israel fought strenuously against Jewish
settlement in the Holy Land, which had accelerated after Britain’s 1917
Balfour Declaration calling for the establishment of a Jewish homeland
in the Middle East.

Beginning in 1919, al-Husseini began organizing jihad attacks
against Jews, as well as riots in Jerusalem in 1920 during which six Jews
were killed and two hundred injured. The following year, British high
commissioner Herbert Samuel responded to al-Husseini’s instigation of
jihad violence by appointing him mufti of Jerusalem, hoping that this
gift would lead al-Husseini to be “devoted to tranquility."

Instead, al-Husseini continued to incite violence, including riots in
Petach Tikvah and Jaffa just weeks after he became mufti; forty-three Jews

302 Tue History or JinAp: From MunaAmMMan to ISIS

were killed. A British government report stated that “the Arab majority,
who were generally the aggressors, inflicted most of the casualties.”

This continued to be true as Muslim Arabs attacked Jews over the
next two decades, largely at al-Husseini’s instigation. Instead of confront-
ing its mufti, in May 1939 the British government limited Jewish settle-
ment in Palestine to seventy-five thousand over the next five years, thereby
rewarding jihad violence by giving the mufti part of what he wanted (if it
had been up to him, Jewish entry into the Holy Land would have been
halted entirely, and the Jews there expelled) and condemning to death in
the Holocaust untold numbers of Jews who might have escaped.

Al-Husseini stirred up the mobs by claiming that Jews had designs
on large portions of the Islamic world: “Palestine does not satisfy the
Jews, because their goal is to rule over the rest of the Arab nations, over
Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq, and even over the lands of Khyber in Saudi
Arabia, under the pretext that this city was the homeland of the Jewish
tribes in the seventh century.”

Had that been true, Islamic law would have obligated Muslims to
wage a defensive jihad against the Jews, for, as noted previously, defen-
sive jihad becomes obligatory upon every Muslim whenever a Muslim
land is attacked. As far as al-Husseini was concerned, his effort against
the Jews was indeed a jihad. At a conference in Syria in 1937, he con-
tributed an address entitled “Islam and the Jews,” in which he explained:

The battle between Jews and Islam began when Moham-
med fled from Mecca to Medina..,. In those days the Jew-
ish methods were exactly the same as they are today. Then as
now, slander was their weapon. They said Mohammed was
a swindler.... They tried to undermine his honor.... They
began to pose senseless and unanswerable questions to Mo-
hammed...and then they tried to annihilate the Muslims.
Just as the Jews were able to betray Mohammed, so they
will betray the Muslims today...the verses of the Koran and
the Hadith assert that the Jews were Islam's most bitter en-
emy and moreover try to destroy it.”

From 1941 to 1945, al-Husseini lived in Berlin, where he became close
friends with Adolf Eichmann and Heinrich Himmler, and met with

CHaerer Nine

303

Adolf Hitler. Eichmann’s assistant, Dicter Wisliczeny, testified at the
Nuremberg Trials that the mufti had been a central figure in the plan-

ning of the genocide of the Jews:

The Grand Mufti has repeatedly suggested to the Nazi
authorities—including Hitler, von Ribbentrop and
Himmler—the extermination of European Jewry. He con-
sidered this a comfortable solution to the Palestine prob-
lem.... The Mufti was one of the initiators of the systematic
extermination of European Jewry and had been a collabora-
tor and adviser of Eichmann and Himmler in the execution
of this plan. He was one of Eichmann’s best friends and
had constantly incited him to accelerate the extermination
measures. I heard him say, accompanied by Eichmann, he
had visited incognito the gas chambers of Auschwitz.”

Eichmann denied this, but in any case, there is no doubt of the fact that
the mufti was openly calling for the mass murder of Jews. In a broadcast

on July 7, 1942, the mufti exhorted Muslims in Egypt, Syria, lrag, and

Palestine to kill Jews, basing his exhortation on a flagrant lie:

A large number of Jews residing in Egypt and a number of
Poles, Greeks, Armenians and Free French, have been is-
sued with revolvers and ammunition in order to help them
against the Egyptians at the last moment, when Britain is
forced to evacuate Egypt.

In the face of this barbaric procedure by the British we
think it best, if the life of the Egyptian nation is to be saved,
that the Egyptians rise as one man to kill the Jews before
they have a chance of betraying the Egyptian people. It is
the duty of the Egyptians to annihilate the Jews and to de-
stroy their property...

You must kill the Jews, before they open fire on you.
Kill the Jews, who have appropriated your wealth and who
are plotting against your security. Arabs of Syria, Iraq and
Palestine, what are you waiting for? The Jews are planning
to violate your women, to kill your children and to destroy

304

Al-Husseini also actively intervened on numerous occasions to ensure
that Jews were not deported from Europe—thereby ensuring that exter-
mination was the only option left for the fanatical Nazi Jew-haters. As
late as July 25, 1944, al-Husseini wrote to Joachim von Ribbentrop, the

Tue History oF Jihap: From MunaAMMap To ISIS

you. According to the Muslim religion, the defense of your
life is a duty which can only be fulfilled by annihilating the
Jews. This is your best opportunity to get rid of this dirty
race, which has usurped your rights and brought misfortune
and destruction on your countries. Kill the Jews, burn their
property, destroy their stores, annihilate these base support-
ers of British imperialism. Your sole hope of salvation lies
in annihilating the Jews before they annihilate you.”

German minister for foreign affairs:

I have previously called the attention of your Excellen-
cy to the constant attempts of the Jews to emigrate from
Europe in order to reach Palestine and asked your Ex-
cellency to undertake the necessary steps so as to prevent
the Jews from emigrating. I had also sent you a letter, un-
der date of June 5, 1944, in regard to the plan for an ex-
change of Egyptians living in Germany with Palestinian
Germans, in which I asked you to exclude the Jews from
this plan of exchange. I have, however, learned that the
Jews did depart on July 2, 1944, and J am afraid that fur-
ther groups of Jews will leave for Palestine from Germa-
ny and France to be exchanged for Palestinian Germans.

This exchange on the part of the Germans would en-
courage the Balkan countries likewise to send their Jews
to Palestine. This stop would be incomprehensible to the
Arabs and Moslems after your Excellency’s declaration
of November 2, 1943 that “the destruction of the so-
called Jewish national home in Palestine is an immutable
part of the policy of the greater German Reich” and it
would create in them a feeling of keen disappointment.

It is for this reason that I ask your Excellency to do

CHAPTER NINE 305

all that is necessary to prohibit the emigration of Jews to
Palestine, and in this way your Excellency would give a new
practical example of the policy of the naturally allied and
friendly Germany towards the Arab Nation.”

According to the Arab Higher Committee, “In virtually identical letters,
the Mufti, in the summer of 1944, approached Germany, Romania, Bul-
garia, and Hungary to speed up the extermination of the Jews by sending
them to Poland where the Nazi death chambers were located.””

Whatever the mufti’s actual role in the establishment of the Nazi
death camps, he certainly approved of their work, saying confidently:
“The Arab nation awaits the solution of the world Jewish problem by its
friends, the Axis powers.””

Al-Husseini was a committed collaborator with the Nazis, traveling
from Berlin to Bosnia in 1943 to raise up a Muslim SS company, which
was responsible for killing ninety percent of the Jews in Bosnia, as well
as for the burning of numerous Serbian churches.” He noted the conver-
gence of the goals of Islamic jihad and those of the Nazis. “It is the duty
of Muhammadans in general and Arabs in particular to...drive all Jews
from Arab and Muhammadan countries.... Germany is also struggling
against the common foe who oppressed Arabs and Muhammadans in
their different countries. It has very clearly recognized the Jews for what
they are and resolved to find a definitive solution [endgiltige Lésung] for
the Jewish danger that will eliminate the scourge that Jews represent in
the world.”

The mufti also made radio broadcasts in Arabic from Berlin that
were beamed into the Arabic-speaking world, using Islam to bring Ar-
abs over to Hitler’s side. On May 9, 1941, he broadcast a fatwa calling
upon Muslims in Iraq to wage jihad against the British, In response,
Muslims in Iraq began murdering Jews, ultimately killing 128 while de-
stroying well over a thousand Jewish businesses and homes.”

That was just what the mufti wanted, and he wanted much more.
On November 2, 1943, he decried “the overwhelming egotism which
lies in the character of Jews, their unworthy belief that they are God’s
chosen nation and their assertion that all was created for them and
that other people are animals.””* All that, he said, made Jews “inca-
pable of being trusted. They cannot mix with any other nation but

306 THe History or Jroap: From MuwamMMAp To ISIS

live as parasites among the nations, suck out their blood, embezzle
their property, corrupt their morals.” In a 1944 broadcast, he was more
succinct: “Kill the Jews wherever you find them. This pleases God,
history, and religion.””? His call was an echo of the Qur’an’s call to “kill
them wherever you find them” (2:191, 4:89) and to “kill the idolaters
wherever you find them.” (9:5)

Al-Husseini was arrested by French troops in May 1945, but the
French refused requests from the British to turn him over to their custo-
dy. The British may have wanted to put him on trial, as he was a British
citizen (of their Palestinian mandate) and a collaborator with the Nazis.
Instead, the French put him on a plane to Cairo, where he resumed his
jihad against the Jews. The Muslim Brotherhood successfully prevailed
upon the Egyptian government to grant him asylum.”

Strangling Israel in its Cradle

In October 1947, al-Banna told the Brotherhood to begin preparing for
jthad.*' The Brothers were ready for this call, as the Brotherhood was
dedicated to an Islamic revival, and since the Qur’an and Sunnah teach
wartare, jihad war was part of that revival. The Brotherhood had weap-
ons and a military wing, preaching revival openly while secretly amassing
weapons and preparing for jihad.

U.S. president Franklin D, Roosevelt declined to give any significant
support to the Zionist project. When Rabbis Stephen S$, Wise and Abba
Hillel Silver tried to convince him that Jewish refugees from Europe
should be moved to the Holy Land, he responded: “Do you want to be
responsible by your actions for the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives?
Do you want to start a holy jihad?” (In saying this, he demonstrated far
greater awareness of history and Islam than many of his successors, but
about their same level of resolve to confront it.) After a conversation with
his friend, the Saudi king, Roosevelt recounted happily to Congress: “I
learned more about the whole problem by talking with Ibn Saud for five
minutes than I could have learned in an exchange of two or three dozen
letters." That the king’s perspective was formed by jihadi assumptions
about who rightfully owned the land did not appear to trouble Roosevelt
in the least.

CHAPTER NINE 307

After the horrors of the Holocaust were revealed, however, the Zi-
onist movement was able to gain a great deal of international support,
most notably from Roosevelt’s successor as president, Harry S. Truman.
The state of Israel declared its independence on May 14, 1948.

The Muslim Brotherhood was in the front line of the jihad effort
to smother the Jewish state in its cradle. Al-Banna predicted: “All Arabs
shall arise and annihilate the Jews. We shall fill the sea with their corps-
es.”** Abdul Rahman Azzam, the secretary-general of the Arab League,
said: “I personally wish that the Jews do not drive us to this war, as this
will be a war of extermination and momentous massacre which will be
spoken of like the Tartar massacre or the Crusader wars.”®

Hajj Amin al-Husseini emphasized that this was not just a war but
a jihad, saying: “I declare a holy war, my Muslim brothers! Murder the
Jews! Murder them all!”** The idea that the Arab war against the new
Jewish state was not just a conflict over territory but an Islamic jihad was
based on the Qur’anic command to “drive them out from where they
drove you out” (2:191), the same command that the Muslim Brother-
hood invoked to call for Islamic reconquest of Spain and the Balkans.
The Islamic principle that no land that had ever been ruled by the laws
of Islam could ever legitimately revert to rule by the infidels, and that
all land once won by Islam belonged to Islam forever, meant that a state
of Israel ruled by Jews would never be acceptable in any form. Israel
was even more of an insult because of the Qur’an’s many anti-Semitic
passages, portraying Jews as dishonest schemers, enemies of Allah, and
enemies of the Muslims: “You will surely find the most intense of the
people in animosity toward the believers to be the Jews” (5:82). Arab
leaders consequently rejected the United Nations’ partition of the area
and creation of an Arab state alongside the Jewish state and called in-
stead for war.

Many Muslims heeded this call, massacring forty-one Jews at the
Haifa oil depot in December 1947, burning Jews alive at the Ein Zeitun
settlement in January 1948; ambushing and murdering thirty-five Jews
on a Jerusalem road that same month and sexually mutilating the corps-
es; killing one and injuring twenty with a bomb in the Jerusalem Post
offices in February 1948; murdering forty-six and injuring 130 with a

308 Tre Hisrory of JIHAD: From MuuAMMAD TO ISIS

bomb at the Ben Yehuda market later that month; murdering fourteen
and injuring forty with still another bomb at the Jewish Agency building
in March 1948; ambushing and murdering 105 Jews on another road in
April 1948; destroying thirty-five synagogues and other Jewish institu-
tions in May 1948; disemboweling several women at Nitzanim in June
1948; and on and on. The mufti’s Arab Liberation Army killed three
hundred Jews at Kfar Etzion, south of Jerusalem, in jihad attacks in the
opening months of 1948; the Muslims blew up one house with twenty
Jewish girls inside it.*”

On April 4, 1948, Easter Sunday, Arabic-language notices were
posted in Jerusalem saying, “The Government is with us, Allenby is with
us, kill the Jews; there is no punishment for killing Jews.”** Allenby was
the English field marshal viscount Edmund Allenby, who had won the
admiration of Muslims in Jerusalem when he took the city from the
Ottomans in 1917 while emphasizing that he was only fighting the sul-
tanate, not crusading against Islam. Allenby brushed aside celebrations
of him as being the Christian commander who had liberated Jerusalem
from 730 years of Turkish rule; he was not religious, and his war was no
Crusade.*” Allenby died in 1936, so the authors of these posters were
invoking his spirit and claiming his blessing on their pogrom. A Muslim
mob chanting, “Palestine is our land, kill the Jews” and, “We will drink
the blood of the Jews” began rampaging through the city; at the end of
the day, five Jews were dead and 216 injured.”? There would be much,
much more of this to come in the years and decades ahead: Muslim Ar-
abs never stopped waging jihad against Israel.

Arthur Derounian met Hasan al-Banna while in Cairo to cover the
jihad that the Muslim Brotherhood and other Muslims were preparing
against Israel. He found a great deal of excitement and enthusiasm for
the jihad against the Jews. He also met with Saleh Harb Pasha, Egypt’s
former minister of defense and a close friend of al-Banna’s; Harb Pasha
expressed regret at the outcome of World War II: “If Rommel had won
we would be independent now, If the Nazis and Fascists had won, they
would have been friends to the whole Arab world. And there would
have been no Zionist problem because there would have been no Zionist
Jews...or any Jews at all left.””!

CHAPTER NINE 309

An imam told Derounian: “I pray to Allah to destroy the Jews. I pray
to Allah to punish President Truman because he has been on the Zionist
side. I used to pray against President Roosevelt, a very bad man.... May
Balfour and Roosevelt take the first place in hell. Allah, Allah, may this
be done.”” One jihadi assured the American journalist: “Our God is the
strongest. We are not afraid to die. The Jews are cowards because they
want to live. The Arabs would rather lose ten men than one gun. The
Jews are the opposite. They want to save their lives and lose their guns.
That is one difference between us.”

The jihadi was wrong. The nascent state of Israel defeated forces
from Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Transjordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Ye-
men that had been determined to destroy it utterly, The jihad against
it continued, but it held firm, defeating Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Jordan, and
Lebanon again in the Six-Day War in 1967, and Egypt and Syria yet
again in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. In winning these victories against
enormous odds, Israel won the admiration of the free world, leading to
the largest-scale and most audacious application in Islamic history of
Muhammad’s dictum “War is deceit.””

In order to destroy the impression of the tiny Jewish state’s facing
enormous Muslim Arab foes and prevailing, the Soviet KGB (the Soviet
Committee for State Security) developed the fiction of an even smaller
people, the “Palestinians,” menaced by a well-oiled and ruthless Israeli
war machine. In A.D. 134, the Romans had expelled the Jews from Judea
after the Bar Kokhba revolt and renamed the region Palestine, a name
they plucked from the Bible, the name of the Israelites’ ancient enemies,
the Philistines. But never had the name Palestinian referred to anything
but a region, not to a people or an ethnicity. In the 1960s, however, the
KGB and Hajj Amin al-Husseini’s nephew Yasir Arafat created both
these allegedly oppressed people and the instrument of their freedom,
the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).

Ion Mihai Pacepa, who had served as acting chief of Cold War-
era Communist Romania's spy service, later revealed that “the PLO was
dreamt up by the KGB, which had a penchant for ‘liberation’ organiza-
tions. There was the National Liberation Army of Bolivia, created by the
KGB in 1964 with help from Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara...the KGB also

310 THe History oF Jrnap: From MunammMand To ISIS

created the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which car-
ried out numerous bombing attacks.... In 1964 the first PLO Council,
consisting of 422 Palestinian representatives handpicked by the KGB,
approved the Palestinian National Charter—a document that had been
drafted in Moscow. The Palestinian National Covenant and the Pales-
tinian Constitution were also born in Moscow, with the help of Ahmed
Shuqairy, a KGB influence agent who became the first PLO chairman.””

For Arafat to head up the PLO, he had to be a Palestinian. Pace-
pa explained that “he was an Egyptian bourgeois turned into a devoted
Marxist by KGB foreign intelligence. The KGB had trained him at its
Balashikha special-operations school east of Moscow and in the mid-
1960s decided to groom him as the future PLO leader. First, the KGB
destroyed the official records of Arafat’s birth in Cairo, and replaced
them with fictitious documents saying that he had been born in Jerusa-
lem and was therefore a Palestinian by birth.””

Arafat may have been a Marxist, at least at first, but he and his
Soviet handlers made copious use of Islamic anti-Semitism. KGB chief
Yuri Andropov noted that “the Islamic world was a waiting petri dish in
which we could nurture a virulent strain of America-hatred, grown from
the bacterium of Marxist-Leninist thought. Islamic anti-Semitism ran
deep.... We had only to keep repeating our themes—that the United
States and Israel] were ‘fascist, imperial-Zionist countries’ bankrolled by
rich Jews. Islam was obsessed with preventing the infidels’ occupation of
its territory, and it would be highly receptive to our characterization of
the U.S. Congress as a rapacious Zionist body aiming to turn the world
into a Jewish fiefdom.””

PLO executive committee member Zahir Muhsein explained the
strategy more fully in a 1977 interview with the Dutch newspaper Troww:

The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Pal-
estinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle
against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today
there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syr-
ians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do
we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people,
since Arab national interests demand that we posit the ex-
istence of a distinct “Palestinian people” to oppose Zionism.

Cuaprer NINE 311

For tactical reasons, Jordan, which is a sovereign state
with defined borders, cannot raise claims to Haifa and Jaffa,
while as a Palestinian, ] can undoubtedly demand Haifa,
Jatfa, Beer-Sheva and Jerusalem. However, the moment we
reclaim our right to all of Palestine, we will not wait even a
minute to unite Palestine and Jordan.”

Once the people had been created, their desire for peace could be easily
fabricated as well. Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu tutored Ara-
fat in how to play the West like a fiddle. Pacepa recounted: “In March
1978, I secretly brought Arafat to Bucharest for final instructions on how
to behave in Washington. ‘You simply have to keep on pretending that
you'll break with terrorism and that you'll recognize Israel—over, and
over, and over,’ Ceausescu told him [Arafat].... Ceausescu was euphoric
over the prospect that both Arafat and he might be able to snag a No-
bel Peace Prize with their fake displays of the olive branch.... Ceauses-
cu failed to get his Nobel Peace Prize. But in 1994 Arafat got his—all
because he continued to play the role we had given him to perfection.
He had transformed his terrorist PLO into a government-in-exile (the
Palestinian Authority), always pretending to call a halt to Palestinian
terrorism while letting it continue unabated. Two years after signing the
Oslo Accords, the number of Israelis killed by Palestinian terrorists had
risen by 73 percent.””

This strategy continued to work beautifully, through U.S.-brokered
“peace process” after “peace process,” from the 1978 Camp David Ac-
cords into the presidency of Barack Obama and beyond, with no end in
sight. Western authorities never seem to ponder why so many attempts
to achieve a negotiated peace between Israel and the “Palestinians,”
whose historical existence everyone by now takes for granted, have all
failed. The answer, of course, lies in the Islamic doctrine of jihad. “Drive
them out from where they drove you out” is a command that contains no
mitigation and accepts none.

While all of the Palestinian factions made the fact clear (at least
to those who were paying attention) that they would never accept the
existence of Israel in any form, and that their war against it was a Jji-
had, none have made this clearer than Hamas (Harakat Muqawama
Islamiyya—the Islamic Resistance Movement), founded in 1988. The

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Hamas charter calls for Islamic rule in Palestine, describing the PLO’s
idea of a secular state as a Western colonial imposition upon the Muslim
world: “Secular thought is diametrically opposed to religious thought.
Thought is the basis for positions, for modes of conduct and for resolu-
tions. Therefore, in spite of our appreciation for the PLO and its possible
transformation in the future, and despite the fact that we do not deni-
grate its role in the Arab-Israeli conflict, we cannot substitute it for the
Islamic nature of Palestine by adopting secular thought. For the Islamic
nature of Palestine is part of our religion, and anyone who neglects his
religion is bound to lose.” The charter follows this with a quotation
from the Qur'an: “And who forsakes the religion of Abraham, save him
who befools himself?” (2:130)

Islam is the only unifying factor of the Palestinian factions: “When
the PLO adopts Islam as the guideline for life, then we shall become its
soldiers, the fuel of its fire which will burn the enemies.”™!

Significantly, Hamas identifies itself in its charter as “one of the
wings of the Muslim Brothers in Palestine. The Muslim Brotherhood
Movement is a world organization, the largest Islamic Movement in
the modern era. It is characterized by a profound understanding, by
precise notions and by a complete comprehensiveness of all concepts
of Islam in all domains of life: views and beliefs, politics and econom-
ics, education and society, jurisprudence and rule, indoctrination and
teaching, the arts and publications, the hidden and the evident, and all
the other domains of life,”1°

The charter quotes al-Banna: “Israel will rise and will remain erect
until Islam eliminates it as it had eliminated its predecessors.”! In
keeping with this guiding idea that Islam must be and will be the force
that ultimately eliminates Israel, and that Islamic principles must rule
all aspects of life, Hamas states that “the Islamic Resistance Movement
consists of Muslims who are devoted to Allah and worship Him veri-
ly.... As the Movement adopts Islam as its way of life, its time dimen-
sion extends back as far as the birth of the Islamic Message and of the
Righteous Ancestor. Its ultimate goal is Islam, the Prophet its model,
the Quran its Constitution.”

Hamas sees its Islamic mission as part of the universal Islamic mis-

CHAPTER NINE 313

sion of jihad: “Its spatial dimension extends wherever on earth there are
Muslims, who adopt Islam as their way of life; thus, it penetrates to the
deepest reaches of the land and to the highest spheres of Heavens...
By virtue of the distribution of Muslims, who pursue the cause of the
Hamas, all over the globe, and strive for its victory, for the reinforcement
of its positions and for the encouragement of its Jihad, the Movement is
a universal one.”

Also, in contrast to the PLO’s taste for negotiations as a means to
wring concessions from Israel and its allies, Hamas disdains peace talks:
“[ Peace] initiatives, the so-called peaceful solutions, and the internation-
al conferences to resolve the Palestinian problem, are all contrary to the
beliefs of the Islamic Resistance Movement. For renouncing any part of
Palestine means renouncing part of the religion; the nationalism of the
Islamic Resistance Movement is part of its faith, the movement educates
its members to adhere to its principles and to raise the banner of Allah
over their homeland as they fight their Jihad: ‘Allah is the all-powerful,
but most people are not aware.’ "1%

Hamas and other Palestinian jihad groups have continued the prac-
tice of murdering Israeli civilians, justifying this action as defensive ji-
had, hoping thereby to weaken and demoralize the Jewish state, while
characterizing all of Israel’s defensive efforts as disproportionate, unwar-
ranted, and unjust. It is a jihad of the pen and the tongue combined with
that of the sword, wielded as much in the court of public opinion as in
Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and other areas of Israel.

In keeping with Muhammad's dictum “War is deceit,” Palestinian
propagandists worked assiduously to create a picture for the internation-
al media of a beleaguered Palestinian people menaced by a remorseless
and ruthless Israeli war machine. Numerous Israeli atrocities were man-
ufactured for eager consumption and propagation by the international
media, the most notorious of these being a video purportedly showing
a twelve-year-old boy, Muhammad al-Dura, wantonly murdered by the
Israeli Defense Force in 2000. In reality, there was no murder—and may
not even have been a Muhammad al-Dura. Before that was definitively
established, a Palestinian intifada, or uprising, against Israel killed around
a thousand Israelis.'”

314 Tue History or Jivap: From MuvHaAmmMap To ISIS

The Palestinian propaganda barrage was a magnificent success.
Global opinion, once strongly on the side of Israel, turned so sharply
against the Jewish state that by the end of the twentieth century and
the beginning of the twenty-first, Israel had become the chief target of
United Nations human rights condemnations, and the primary target of
demonstrations on campuses in the United States and elsewhere in the
West. It was a new and highly successful jihad tactic, recognized by few
as such but nonetheless unmistakably just that: all part of an effort to iso-
late, destabilize, and ultimately destroy Israel so that it could be replaced
by an Islamic government.

V. JIHAD AND THE PARTITION OF INDIA

After World War II, as the sun was setting on the British Empire, India
was partitioned into a majority-Hindu area, known as India, and two
majority-Muslim areas, known as East Pakistan (later Bangladesh) and
West Pakistan. The name Pakistan was an amalgamation of the names
of the regions that made it up: Punjab, Afghania, Kashmir, Sindh, and
Baluchistan. “Pak,” however, also means “pure” in Urdu and Persian, and
for many Muslims, Pakistan, a land created specifically for Muslims, was
to be the land of the pure expression of the faith.

The seeds of the partition were planted with the first jihad invasion
of India in the eighth century, which was a manifestation of Islam’s ha-
tred of and contempt for the infidels. Centuries of bloody oppression led
to significant levels of resentment of Muslims among the Hindu pop-
ulation of India. In the aftermath of World War I, the Khilafat move-
ment among Muslims in India protested against the secular Turkish
marginalization, and subsequent abolition, of the caliphate. In doing so,
it promoted the idea that the Muslims of the world should be united in
a single state, although this had not actually been the case at any point
in history except, arguably, in the age of the “Rightly-Guided Caliphs”
before the Sunni/Shi’a split became formalized, but the new propagation
of this idea undermined prospects for Indian unity.'

Although Pakistani leader Muhammad Ali Jinnah was not a doc-
trinaire Muslim and did not found Pakistan as a state ruled by Islamic
law, the proponents of jihad and Sharia backed the partition because it

CuHarter NINE 315

was unacceptable to them for Muslims to live under infidel rule. The
partition itself was acrimonious, with over a million people killed and
fifteen million made refugees.'*” Almost immediately, the new state of
Pakistan began waging jihad against India, in September 1947 arming
militias fighting against Indian rule in the disputed state of Jammu and
Kashmir." Arif Jamal, a historian of the jihad in Kashmir, notes that
“Jinnah had signed a stand-still agreement with the Maharaja [ruler] of
Jammu and Kashmir, and jihad by tribesmen violated that agreement.
The Maharaja then invited Indian troops to defend the state, which led
to the first war between India and Pakistan and the division of Kashmir
by the end of 1948.7"

A historian of Kashmir, Talat Bhat, notes that the drive for Kashmi-
ri independence from India grew progressively more jihadist in character
toward the end of the twentieth century, thanks to Pakistani government
interference: “Kashmir’s independent movement began in 1948 and kept
gaining strength in Indian-occupied areas until 1985, a year after the
hanging of the separatist leader Maqbool Bhat in 1984. His Jammu and
Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) party declared war on India in 1988,
which also led to a popular independence movement. But in 1991, Pa-
kistan’s ISI created Hizbul Mujadeen (HM), an Islamist militant orga-
nization, to counter secular JK LF. Between 1991 and 1993, most JALF
commanders were either killed or jailed by HM or Indian troops. In
1994, JKLF declared unilateral ceasefire but Islamabad sent more Isla-
mists, who had fought the war in Afghanistan, to Kashmir.”'!”

Pakistan and India have remained in an ongoing state of war since
the partition, due to Pakistan’s jihadi intransigence and fanaticism, with
9.471 outbreaks of actual violence in 1947, 1965, 1971, and 1999. In a
telling incident in 1964, the government of Indian prime minister Jawa-
harlal Nehru sent the Kashmiri Muslim leader Sheikh Mohammad Ab-
dullah and his lieutenant, Mirza Mohammad Afzal Beg, to Pakistan for
talks with its military ruler, Field Marshal Ayub Khan. Nehru’s offer was
audacious: the reunion of the subcontinent.

Ayub Khan would have none of it. He later complained that all Ab-
dullah and Mirza Afzal Beg had brought him was an “absurd proposal of
confederation between India, Pakistan and Kashmir.” Ayub recounted: “I

316 Tue Hisrory or JrHap: From MunaAmMab TO ISIS

told him plainly that we would have nothing to do with it. It was curious
that whereas we were seeking the salvation of Kashmiris, they had been
forced to mention an idea which, if pursued, would lead to our enslave-
ment.” What most annoyed Ayub was that “a confederal arrangement
would undo the Partition and place the Hindu majority in a dominant
and decisive position.”"3 This was intolerable, as it contradicted the Is-
lamic imperative to dominate and hold political power over infidels.

The Hizbul Mujadeen commander Burhan Wani has emphasized
that his organization's “jihad is for a Caliphate.”™ As always.

VI. IRAN’S ISLAMIC REVOLUTION

The Fall of the Shah

On October 8, 1962, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, the Western-oriented
shah of Iran, whose father, Reza Shah, had admired Kemal Ataturk and
set Iran on a secular path, granted women the right to vote in elections
for local councils and gave permission for those elected to take their
oaths of office on any sacred book, not just the Qur’an—which meant
that they didn’t have to be Muslim.”

In response, a little-known ayatollah named Ruhollah Khomeini
and his colleagues instructed Shiite clergy all over the country to de-
nounce the government. Several weeks later, the shah relented: his prime
minister, Assadollah Alam, announced that candidates for local councils
would have to be Muslim, that oaths must be sworn on the Qur’an only,
and that the Majlis would decide the question of women’s suffrage.'°

Then, in January 1963, the shah announced a series of reforms he
called the White Revolution, including distributing land to the poor and
allowing women not only to vote but also to run for office. Khomeini
declared, “What is happening is a calculated plot against Iranian inde-
pendence and the Islamic nation, and it is threatening the foundation of
Islam.”*"” He and other Shiite clergy called for demonstrations, which
so unnerved the shah that on January 24, 1963, during a presentation
on the glories of land reform, he gave an impromptu speech attacking
the ayatollahs and their allies as “a stupid and reactionary bunch whose

Cruaprer Nine 317

brains have not moved..,stupid men who don’t understand and are
ill-intentioned...they don’t want to see this country develop.”!"*

The “stupid and reactionary bunch” didn’t give up, and over the
years, tensions increased. The shah exiled Khomeini, but that didn’t calm
the situation. In exile in Iraq in 1970, Khomeini articulated a view called
velayat-e fagih (guardianship of the jurist). Islam, Khomeini argued, had
not just given mankind a set of laws. “A body of laws alone,” said Kho-
meini, “is not sufficient for a society to be reformed. In order for law
to ensure the reform and happiness of man, there must be an executive
power and an executor. For this reason, God Almighty, in addition to
revealing a body of law [that is, the ordinances of the Sharia]...has laid
down a particular form of government together with executive and ad-
ministrative institutions.”!?

Where were these divinely ordained executive and administrative in-
stitutions to be found? Khomeini argued that clerical rule, which many
dismissed as an unacceptable innovation in Islam, was mandated by the
example of Muhammad himself, whom the Qur’an declared to be’ the su-
preme model for Muslims (33:21): “The Most Noble Messenger (peace
and blessings be upon him) headed the executive and administrative in-
stitutions of Muslim society. In addition to conveying the revelation and
expounding and interpreting the articles of faith and the ordinances and
institutions of Islam, he undertook the implementation of law and the
establishment of the ordinances of Islam, thereby bringing into being the
Islamic state.”'”°

So, Khomeni argued, following the example of Muhammad, mod-
ern-day Shrite clerics should rule Iran and make it an Islamic state. He
explained: “The fundamental difference between Islamic government,
on the one hand, and constitutional monarchies and republics, on the
other, is this: whereas the representatives of the people or the monarch
in such regimes engage in legislation, in Islam the legislative power and
competence to establish laws belongs exclusively to God Almighty.”!!

The unrest in Iran grew, and repressive measures from the shah
only raade matters worse. Finally, on January 16, 1979, after riots and
numerous calls for him to go, a tearful shah and his family left Iran.’
Two weeks later, on February 1, Khomeini returned to Iran after fourteen

318 THe History or JIHAD: From MunAMMaAD To ISIS

years of exile. He announced the formation of a new government, declar-
ing: “This is not an ordinary government. It is a government based on the
shari’a. Opposing this government means opposing the sharz’a of Islam
and revolting against the shari’a, and revolt against the government of the
shari’a has its punishment in our law...it is a heavy punishment in Islamic
jurisprudence. Revolt against God's government is a revolt against God.
Revolt against God is blasphemy.”!”*

On November 4, 1979, a group calling itself Muslim Students
Following the Imam’s Line (that is, Khomeini’s line) entered the U.S.
embassy compound in Tehran and took hostage the skeleton staff of
sixty-six that was still serving there after the fall of the shah.”

Khomeini was delighted, dubbing the hostage-taking “the Sec-
ond Revolution.”’” He told a reporter, “I regard the occupation of the
American Embassy as a spontaneous and justified retaliation of our
people.”’”* He explained that the hostage crisis would assist the Islamic
Republic in consolidating power: “This action has many benefits. The
Americans do not want to see the Islamic Republic taking root. We
keep the hostages, finish our internal work, then release them.””’ Fif-
ty-two of the American hostages remained in captivity for 444 days,
until January 20, 1981.'”8

Khomeini continued to ensure that the Islamic Republic would
be Islamic, and nothing but. He declared, “What the nation wants is
an Islamic Republic. Not just a Republic, not a democratic Republic,
not a democratic Islamic Republic. Do not use the word ‘democratic’
to describe it. That is the Western style.”’” Indeed, there was nothing
democratic about his regime. Khomeini embarked on a reign of terror,
executing his political foes in large numbers and shutting down opposi-
tion newspapers and magazines.'° He told secularists, “The ‘clog-wearer
and the turbaned’ have given you a chance. After each revolution several
thousand of these corrupt elements are executed in public and burnt and
the story is over. They are not allowed to publish newspapers....We will
close all parties except the one, or a few which act in a proper mannet....
We all made mistakes. We thought we were dealing with human beings.
It is evident we are not. We are dealing with wild animals. We will not
tolerate them any more.”!*!

CHAPTER NINE 319

The Sharia state that Khomeini constructed gave Iranians nei-
ther democracy nor equality of rights under the law. In 1985, Sa’id
Raja’i-Chorassani, the permanent delegate to the United Nations from
the Islamic Republic of Iran, declared that “the very concept of human
rights was ‘a Judeo-Christian invention’ and inadmissible in Islam...
According to Ayatollah Khomeini, one of the shah’s ‘most despicable
sins’ was the fact that Iran was among the original group of nations that
drafted and approved the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”

Khomeini thundered that fighting was an Islamic duty: “Jihad or
Holy War, which is for the conquest of [other] countries and kingdoms,
becomes incumbent after the formation of the Islamic State in the
presence of the Imam or in accordance with his command. Then Islam
makes it incumbent on all adult males, provided they are not disabled or
incapacitated, to prepare themselves for the conquest of countries so that
the writ of Islam is obeyed in every country in the world.... Islam’s Holy
War is a struggle against idolatry, sexual deviation, plunder, repression
and cruelty..., But those who study Islamic Holy War will understand
why Islam wants to conquer the whole world.”* The goal of this con-
quest would be to establish the hegemony of Islamic law.

Khomeini had no patience for those who insisted that Islam was a
religion of peace:

Those who know nothing of Islam pretend that Islam
counsels against war. Those {who say this] are witless. Islam
says: Kill all the unbelievers just as they would kill you all!
Does this mean that Muslims should sit back until they are
devoured by [the unbelievers]? Islam says: Kall them [the
non-Muslims], put them to the sword and scatter [their
armies]. Does this mean sitting back until [non-Muslims]
overcome us? Islam says: Kill in the service of Allah those
who may want to kill you! Does this mean that we should
surrender [to the enemy]? Islam says: Whatever good there
is exists thanks to the sword and in the shadow of the sword!
People cannot be made obedient except with the sword! The
sword is the key to Paradise, which can be opened only for
the Holy Warriors! There are hundreds of other [Qur’anic]

320 THe History or Jinap: From MuuamMMAD TO ISIS

psalms and Hadiths [sayings of the Prophet] urging Mus-
lims to value war and to fight. Does all this mean that Is-
lam is a religion that prevents men from waging war? I spit
upon those foolish souls who make such a claim.'*

Under the Islamic Republic, Iran became a totalitarian Sharia backwater
and a chief financier of global jihad terrorism. Iran was the embodiment
of a notorious statement of Khomeini’s: “Allah did not create man so
that he could have fun. The aim of creation was for mankind to be put to
the test through hardship and prayer. An Islamic regime must be serious
in every field. There are no jokes in Islam. There is no humor in Islam.
There is no fun in Islam. There can be no fun and joy in whatever is se-
rious. Islam does not allow swimming in the sea and is opposed to radio
and television serials. Islam, however, allows marksmanship, horseback

riding and competition.”!”

The Party of Allah

There was no fun in Islam—or in Iran, either. Through its proxy, the
Lebanese jihad terror group Hizballah (Party of Allah), the Islamic Re-
public pursued jihad against the United States. On October 23, 1983,
Hizballah bombed military barracks in Beirut, murdering 241 Ameri-
can servicemen (including 220 Marines) and fifty-eight French military
personnel. Hizballah and Iran denied involvement in that bombing, but
there was considerable evidence to the contrary—not least the fact that
the truck carrying the over twenty-one thousand pounds of TNT that
exploded at the barracks was driven by Ismail Ascari, an Iranian national.
On May 30, 2003, U.S. District Court judge Royce Lamberth found
Iran and Hizballah responsible for the bombing, which he called “the
most deadly state-sponsored terrorist attack made against United States
citizens before September 11, 2001.”

The Lebanese terror group also won notoriety for its jihad suicide
bombing at the U.S, Embassy in Beirut on April 18, 1983, which killed
sixty-three people, including seventeen Americans. As he did in the bar-
racks case, Lamberth found that the embassy bombing had been carried
out by Hizballah and financed by Iranian officials.

Hizballah continued its actions against the United States by kidnap-

CHAPTER NINE 321

ping the CIA station chief in Lebanon, William Buckley, on March 16,
1984. Buckley’s captors subsequently delivered several videos to Amer-
ican embassies showcasing how they were torturing him. After viewing
the first, CIA director William Casey said: “I was close to tears. It was
the most obscene thing I had ever witnessed. Bill was barely recogniz-
able as the man I had known for years. They had done more than ruin
his body. His eyes made it clear his mind had been played with. Jt was
horrific, medieval and barbarous.”’ No one knows for certain when
William Buckley died. The likeliest time is sometime during the night
of June 3, 1985, the 444th day of his captivity.”!*

Hizballah’s primary mission, of course, was to wage jihad against
Israel. Hizballah founder Hassan Nasrallah has said, “If they [Jews] all
gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them world-
wide.”!*? Hizballah menaced the Jewish state from Lebanon in the
North, while Hamas (Sunni, but also funded by Iran) harassed it from
Gaza in the South.

The Islamic Republic’s Example

In the last two decades of the twentieth century, the Islamic Republic of
Iran became for those who believed that Islamic law was the sole legit-
imate source of law for every society what the Republic of Turkey had
been for secular Muslims in the middle of the century: an example and
an inspiration, an indication that a group with their perspective could
succeed in overthrowing an established national government and take
and hold power in a state.

Bringing down the biggest infidel state of all in the second half of
the twentieth century was the goal of other jihad groups.

VII. JIHAD TERRORISM GOES GLOBAL
In 1969 and 1970, Egypt, Sudan, and Algeria helped Nigeria fight the

rebellious Republic of Biafra, formed from several southeastern Nigerian
provinces. Biafran leader Emeka Ojukwu charged that this was because
those states were Muslim, and Biafra Christian: “It is now evident why
the fanatic Arab-Muslim states like Algeria, Egypt and the Sudan have

322 Tue Htstory or JIHAD: From MutaAmMMap To ISIS

come out openly and massively to support and aid Nigeria in her present
war of genocide against us.... Biafra is one of the few African states
untainted by Islam.” The rebellion was crushed. But the most arresting
manifestation of the globalization of the jihad in the twentieth century
was the formation of global jihad terror groups.

Al-Qaeda

Sheikh Abdullah Azzam was, according to Jane’s Intelligence Review,
“an influential figure in the Muslim Brotherhood” and “the historical
leader of Hamas,” as well as the man who shaped Osama bin Laden's
view of the world.” Born in a Palestinian village in 1941, Azzam was
raised in a pious Muslim household and earned a degree in Sharia
from the Sharia College of Damascus University in 1966. In 1973, he
received a Ph.D. in Islamic jurisprudence from al-Azhar University
in Cairo, the oldest, most respected, and most influential institute of
higher learning in the Muslim world. While in Egypt, he met mem-
bers of key Muslim Brotherhood theorist Sayyid Qutb’s family, who
revered the author of Milestones as a martyr.

Azzam then joined the jihad against Israel, but soon grew frustrated,
furious that his fellow jihadis spent their off-hours gambling and playing
music, both forbidden activities according to Islamic law—particularly in
the interpretation of the Shafi’i school, which holds sway at al-Azhar.'*!
Ultimately, Azzam decided that “this revolution has no religion behind it”
and traveled to Saudi Arabia to teach.’ There he taught that the Mus-
lims’ philosophy, in conflicts with non-Muslims, ought to be “jihad and
the rifle alone. NO negotiations, NO conferences and NO dialogue.”"™

In 1980, attracted by the jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan,
he went to Pakistan to get to know the movement’s leaders. He taught
for a while at the International Islamic University in Islamabad, but soon
resigned to devote himself full-time to jihad. In 1988, Azzam and his “dear
friend,” a wealthy Saudi named Osama bin Laden, founded al-Qaeda (The
Base). In a 2001 interview, however, bin Laden emphasized that al-Qaeda
was simply a group of Muslims waging jihad for the sake of Allah:

This matter isn't about any specific person, and that it is not
about the al-Qaidah Organization. We are the children of

CHaptTer NINE 323

an Islamic Nation, with Prophet Muhammad as its leader,
our Lord is one, our Prophet is one, our Qibla [the direc-
tion Muslims face during prayer] is one, we are one na-
tion [zmmah], and our Book [the Qur’an] is one. And this
blessed Book, with the tradition [sunnah] of our generous
Prophet, has religiously commanded us [a/zamatna] with
the brotherhood of faith [wshuwat al-imaan], and all the
true believers [ 27ineen] are brothers. So the situation isn’t
like the West portrays it, that there is an “organization” with
a specific name (such as “al-Qai‘dah”) and so on."4

Azzam’s written exhortation to Muslims to join the jihad in Afghanistan,
Join the Caravan, is likewise studded with Qur’anic quotations and refer-
ences to the life of Muhammad. Azzam denied that Muhammad ever un-
derstood jihad solely as a spiritual struggle. “The saying, ‘We have returned
from the lesser Jihad [battle] to the greater Jihad,’ which people quote on
the basis that it is a hadith, is in fact a false, fabricated hadith which has no
basis. It is only a saying of Ibrahim bin Abi Ablah, one of the Successors,
and it contradicts textual evidence and reality.” He quotes several authorities
charging that ahadith narrated by Ibrahim bin Abi Ablah are false, includ-
ing one who reports: “He was accused of forging hadith.” Azzam also in-
vokes the medieval Islamic scholar [bn Taymiyya, who wrote: “This hadith
has no source and nobody whomsoever in the field of Islamic knowledge has
narrated it. Jihad against the disbelievers is the most noble of actions and
moreover it is the most important action for the sake of mankind.”!*

For this important action, jihadis receive especial rewards. Azzam
held out as enticements to would-be jihadis statements like this from
Muhammad: “Paradise has one-hundred grades [or levels] which Al-
lah has reserved for the Mujahidun [warriors of jihad] who fight in His
Cause, and the distance between each of two grades is like the distance
between the heaven and the earth.”""°

‘Jihad and hijrah [emigration] to Jihad,” writes Azzam, “have a
deep-rooted role which cannot be separated from the constitution of
this religion.”!*””

Azzam points out in Join the Caravan that Muhammad himself
went on twenty-seven “military excursions” and that “he himself fought
in nine of these.” After summarizing Muhammad's military career, Az-

324 Tue History or Jinap: FRoM MuHAMMAD TO ISIS

zam notes that “this means that the Messenger of Allah (SAWS) used
to go out on military expeditions or send out an army at least every two
months.”!8 He quotes a hadith in which Muhammad says that Islam's
“highest peak” is jihad.”

Azzam quotes the medieval Qur’an commentator Abu Abdullah
Muhammad Al-Qurtubi, who declared that “going out for Jihad is com-
pulsory in times of need, of advent of the disbelievers, and of severe
furore [sic] of fighting.”!*°°

Osama bin Laden carried on with al-Qaeda after Azzam’s death in
1989, waging jihad first against the Soviets in Afghanistan and then turn-
ing to other infidels. The group grew quickly into a worldwide movement,
with help from (according to U.S. State Department estimates) as much
as two billion dollars from the Saudi government.’*! It demonstrated its
reach on February 26, 1993, when al-Qaeda operatives exploded an elev-
en-hundred-pound bomb at the World Trade Center in New York City,
killing six people and injuring a thousand.’*? As it happened, the jihadis
had placed the bomb poorly, minimizing the damage; they had hoped to
bring down the Twin Towers and murder tens of thousands.

Al-Qaeda operatives also took their jihad to the Balkans, streaming
into the former Ottoman holdings in Eastern Europe in the early 1990s,
when the dissolution of Yugoslavia provided them a new opportunity to
conquer and Islamize the land once and for all.

The jihad commander Abu Abdel Aziz Barbaros, his two-foot-long
beard dyed with henna after the example of the Prophet Muhammad,
declared that the Bosnian war “confirmed the saying of the Prophet,
peace and blessings be upon him, ‘Verily, the jihad will endure until the
Day of Judgment.’ A new jihad was beginning in Bosnia; we went there,
and we joined the battle, according to God’s will.”"9 In a 1994 interview
for a Muslim newspaper in the United States, Aziz firmly rejected the
prevailing view that jihad rhetoric was a cover for political motivations:
“As to your question about the characteristics needed for someone to be
a Mujahid [warrior of jihad], I say: Belief in Allah, praised be He [comes
first]. He should be in our sight, heart and mind. We have to make Jihad
to make His word supreme, not for a nationalistic cause, a tribal cause,
a group feeling or any other cause. This matter is of great importance in
this era, especially since many groups fight and want to see to it that their

CHAPTER Nine 325

fighting is Jihad and their dead ones are martyrs. We have to investigate
this matter and see under what banner one fights,”"™

Al-Qaeda moved into Chechnya as well. Muslim Chechens have
been waging jihad against the Russians for over two centuries.' As long
ago as the 1780s, a convert to Islam from Catholicism who called himself
Sheikh Mansour led a jihad against the Russians in Chechnya on behalf
of the Ottoman Sultan. Later, Ghazi Mullah, a disciple of the Naqsh-
bandi Sufi mullah Muhammad Yaraghi, proclaimed a jihad against the
Russians and attempted to institute the Sharia in Chechnya. Ghazi’s Sufi
ties—and the Sufi army he raised—are interesting in that present-day
Westerners generally regard Muslim Sufis as peaceful; this may be true,
but it would be hasty to assume that they have all rejected the Islamic
doctrines of jihad. His disciple, the imam Shamyl, actually presided over
what Chechens still remember as the “Time of Sharia in the Caucasus.”
In the 1990s, Chechen struggles for independence took on a decidedly
Islamic cast. With material and religious aid from Wahhabi Saudi Arabia,
a disciple of Osama bin Laden named Omar Ibn al Khattab positioned
the Chechen independence fight as part of the global jihad.!°°

In August 1996, bin Laden published a fatwa entitled “Declaration
of War against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy
Places,” declaring jihad against the United States for daring to base its
troops in Saudi Arabia, first to defeat Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in late 1990
and early 1991, and force it to relinquish its claim to Kuwait as an Iraqi
province, and then to keep the peace in the region. Bin Laden retailed
grievances, thereby basing his call for jihad firmly within the Islamic
theology of defensive jihad: “It should not be hidden from you that the
people of Islam had suffered from aggression, iniquity and injustice im-
posed on them by the Zionist-Crusaders alliance and their collaborators;
to the extent that the Muslims’ blood became the cheapest and their
wealth as loot in the hands of the enemies,”!”’

Bin Laden listed areas around the world where Muslim blood was
supposedly being spilled, and then declared: “The people of Islam awak-
ened and realised that they are the main target for the aggression of the
Zionist-Crusaders alliance.”'* And “the latest and the greatest of these
aggressions, incurred by the Muslims since the death of the Prophet, is
the occupation of the land of the two Holy Places—the foundation of

\

326 Tur History OF JIHAD: FROM MUHAMMAD TO ISIS

the house of Islam, the place of the revelation, the source of the message
and the place of the noble Ka’ba, the Qiblah of all Muslims—by the
armies of the American Crusaders and their allies.”

Addressing Americans, bin Laden wrote: “Terrorising you, while
you are carrying arms on our land, is a legitimate and morally demanded
duty. It is a legitimate night well known to all humans and other crea-
tures. Your example and our example is like a snake which entered into
a house of a man and got killed by him, The coward is the one who lets
you walk, while carrying arms, freely on his land and provides you with
peace and security.”

Also, in 1996, bin Laden moved to Afghanistan, joining forces
with the Taliban (“Students”), a jihad group that proclaimed the Islamic
Emirate of Afghanistan that year. His vision, however, continued to be
global. On February 23, 1998, he joined jihad leaders from Egypt, Pa-
kistan, and Bangladesh in what they called the World Islamic Front and
issued a statement entitled “Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders.” [t begins
by invoking martial statements of the Qur’an and Muhammad:

Praise be to Allah, who revealed the Book, controls the
clouds, defeats factionalism, and says in His Book: “But
when the forbidden months are past, then fight and slay the
pagans wherever ye find them, seize them, beleaguer them,
and lie in wait for them in every stratagem [of war]”; and
peace be upon our Prophet, Muhammad Bin-’Abdallah, who
said: “I have been sent with the sword between my hands to
ensure that no one but Allah is worshipped, Allah who put
my livelihood under the shadow of my spear and who inflicts
humiliation and scorn on those who disobey my orders.”"*!

Then, after reiterating many of the charges of American aggression
against Muslims from the 1996 statement, it adds: “All these crimes and
sins committed by the Americans are a clear declaration of war on Al-
Jah, his messenger, and Muslims. And wema [Muslim scholars] have
throughout Islamic history unanimously agreed that the jihad is an in-
dividual duty if the enemy destroys the Muslim countries.”"* Therefore,

CHAPTER NINE 327

...the ruling to kill the Americans and their allies—civilians
and military—is an individual duty for every Muslim who
can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it, in order
to liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque and the holy mosque [Mec-
ca] from their grip, and in order for their armies to move out
of all the lands of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten any
Muslim. This is in accordance with the words of Almighty
Allah, “and fight the pagans all together as they fight you all
together,” and “fight them until there is no more tumult or
oppression, and there prevail justice and faith in Allah.”...

We—with Allah’s help—call on every Muslim who be-
lieves in Allah and wishes to be rewarded to comply with
Allah’s order to kill the Americans and plunder their money
wherever and whenever they find it. We also call on Muslim
ulema, leaders, youths, and soldiers to launch the raid on
Satan’s U.S. troops and the devil’s supporters allying with
them, and to displace those who are behind them so that
they may learn a lesson.’

On August 7, 1998, Al-Qaeda killed 223 people in jihad attacks on the
American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, but Osama bin Laden and
his followers would teach their most memorable and resounding lesson
on September 11, 2001."

Yet, as the warriors of jihad were preparing for a new onslaught
against the West, their targets began to display a most peculiar reaction:
a denial that any of it was happening because of the jihadis’ stated moti-
vations, despite fourteen hundred years of history showing that warfare
against the unbelievers was indeed a genuine priority of believers in Is-
lam. In 1998, U.S. President Bill Clinton said this at the United Nations:

Many believe there is an inevitable clash between Western
civilization and Western values, and Islamic civilizations and
values. I believe this view is terribly wrong. False prophets
may use and abuse any religion to justify whatever political
objectives they have—even cold-blooded murder. Some may

4

328 Tut History or Jinap: From MuHAMMAD To ISIS

have the world believe that almighty God himself, the merci-
ful, grants a license to kill. But that is not our understanding
of Islam.... Americans respect and honor Islam.’

In time, even as the new jihad against the West escalated, Clinton's
words would become cliché, repeated by Western politicians ad infini-
tum after every new jihad attack.

PDF created by Rajesh Arya - Gujarat

CHAPTER TEN

THE WEST LOSES THE
WILL TO LIVE

Jihad tn the Twenty-First Century

SEPTEMBER 11

On September 11, 2001, al-Qaeda initiated a new phase of the jihad
against the United States, and the free world in general, only to find that
the traditional foes of the warriors of jihad were no longer interested in
fighting, or at least in conceiving of the conflict as it had historically.

On that day, al-Qaeda operatives hijacked jetliners and flew them
into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City and
the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. Passengers resisted on a fourth jet
and managed to bring it down in rural Pennsylvania, far from its intend-
ed Washington target, which may have been the White House or the
Capito] building. Nearly three thousand people were killed.

This was jihad, but it was markedly different from jihad attacks that
the West had faced before. The free world was not facing a state that had
declared jihad against it, but an international organization operating in
the name of Islam, not dependent upon a charismatic leader (although it
had one) or centered in any particular geographical location. Yet this was
not a “hijacking” of Islam either, as was widely claimed at the time; the
underlying principles of jihad remained the same.

Why did al-Qaeda strike New York and Washington? Osama bin
Laden explained in a 2004 interview that al-Qaeda's overall objective
was to drain the United States economically, a shrewd jihad objective

4

330 THe History or Jinan: From MunAmMMapD To ISIS

to bring down an enemy many times stronger than the jihad force:
“We are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of
bankruptcy. Allah willing, and nothing is too great for Allah.... We,
alongside the mujahedeen, bled Russia for 10 years until it went bank-
rupt and was forced to withdraw in defeat.”’ He boasted that it was
“easy for us to provoke and bait this administration. All that we have to
do is to send two mujahedeen to the furthest point east to raise a piece
of cloth on which is written al Qaeda, in order to make generals race
there to cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses
without their achieving anything of note other than some benefits for
their private corporations.”

Noting a British estimate that 9/11 cost al-Qaeda five hundred
thousand dollars, bin Laden said: “Every dollar of al Qaeda defeated
a million dollars, by the permission of Allah, besides the loss of a huge
number of jobs, As for the economic deficit, it has reached record astro-
nomical numbers estimated to total more than a trillion dollars.... And
it all shows that the real loser is you. It is the American people and their
economy.... So the war went ahead, the death toll rose, the American
economy bled, and Bush became embroiled in the swamps of Iraq that
threaten his future.”

But why did al-Qaeda want to bring America down? In the No-
vember 24, 2002, “Letter to the American People” that bore his name,
bin Laden explained: “Why are we fighting and opposing you? The
answer is very simple: Because you attacked us and continue to attack
us.”* That stated neatly the requirements of defensive jihad, but the
overarching goal of jihad warfare remained: the war against the United
States would not end with the U.S.’ ceasing to attack the Muslims; it
would end only with the submission of the United States to the war-
riors of jihad, as bin Laden stated succinctly: “The first thing that we
are calling you to is Islam.”

Other al-Qaeda plotters involved in planning the September 11 at-
tacks, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, issued a statement in 2009
that explicitly grounded their actions in Islamic religious terms: the very
motive that neither the media nor the government showed any inclina-
tion of wanting to acknowledge or examine. The statement was even
entitled “The Islamic Response to the Government's Nine Accusations.”

CHAPTER TEN 331

“Many thanks to God,” they wrote about the attacks, “for his kind
gesture, and choosing us to perform the act of Jihad for his cause and to
defend Islam and Muslims. Therefore, killing you and fighting you, de-
stroying you and terrorizing you, responding back to your attacks, are all
considered to be great legitimate duty in our religion. These actions are
our offerings to God. In addition, it is the imposed reality on Muslims
in Palestine, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Iraq, in the land of the two holy
sites [Mecca and Medina, Saudi Arabia], and in the rest of the world,
where Muslims are suffering from your brutality, terrorism, killing of the
innocent, and occupying their lands and their holy sites.”

They emphasized, however, that this was not solely a response to
American attacks. It stemmed ultimately from the fact that the United
States was not an Islamic polity: “Nevertheless, it would have been the
greatest religious duty to fight you over your infidelity. However, today,
we fight you over defending Muslims, their land, their holy sites, and
their religion as a whole.”®

Denial

Despite the open avowals of the perpetrators, one of the most con-
troverted aspects of the September 11 attacks became the question of
whether or not they had anything to do with Islam and jihad. The fore-
most personage to deny the connection was the putative leader of the
free world. On September 17, 2001, U.S. President George W. Bush
appeared at the Islamic Center of Washington, D.C., in the company of
several prominent Muslim leaders, and said:

These acts of violence against innocents violate the funda-
mental tenets of the Islamic faith. And it’s important for
my fellow Americans to understand that.

The English translation is not as eloquent as the orig-
inal Arabic, but let me quote from the Koran, itself: In the
long run, evil in the extreme will be the end of those who do
evil. For that they rejected the signs of Allah and held them
up to ridicule.

The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. That's
not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace. These terrorists

332 THe History orf JinAD: FRoM MunammManp TO ISIS

don’t represent peace. They represent evil and war.

When we think of Islam we think of a faith that brings
comfort to a billion people around the world. Billions of
people find comfort and solace and peace. And that's made
brothers and sisters out of every race—out of every race.’

As Americans still searched the smoking ruins of the World Trade Cen-
ter for the remains of their loved ones, President Bush cautioned Amer-
icans against thinking ill of Muslims, as if the 9/11 attacks had been
perpetrated by Americans targeting Muslims:

America counts millions of Muslims amongst our citizens,
and Muslims make an incredibly valuable contribution to
our country. Muslims are doctors, lawyers, law professors,
members of the military, entrepreneurs, shopkeepers, moms
and dads. And they need to be treated with respect. In our
anger and emotion, our fellow Americans must treat each
other with respect.

Women who cover their heads in this country must feel
comfortable going outside their homes. Moms who wear
cover must be not intimidated in America. That’s not the
America I know. That’s not the America I value.

I’ve been told that some fear to leave; some don’t want
to go shopping for their families; some don’t want to go
about their ordinary daily routines because, by wearing cov-
er, they’re afraid they'll be intimidated. That should not and
that will not stand in America.

Those who feel like they can intimidate our fellow
citizens to take out their anger don’t represent the best of
America, they represent the worst of humankind, and they
should be ashamed of that kind of behavior.

This is a great country. It’s a great country because
we share the same values of respect and dignity and hu-
man worth. And it is my honor to be meeting with leaders
who feel just the same way I do. They're outraged, they’re

CHAPTER TEN 333
sad. They love America just as much as I do.

Muslims were not being subjected to wholesale vigilante attacks in the
United States, at that time or at any point subsequently. This speech was
an exercise in vassalage that would have made the late-fourteenth- and
early-fifteenth-century Byzantine emperors ashamed, yet Bush was by
no means alone. Political leaders all over the West echoed his words
about Islam's being a religion of peace, having nothing to do with ter-
rorism. After September 11, this became a commonplace of the Western
political discourse, rejected only by a small minority, who were quickly
stigmatized as cranks.

The Saudi Involvement in September 11

Why Bush turned so quickly after the September 11 attacks to dissem-
bling about their motivating ideology remains a mystery, but the best
explanation for it remains Saudi influence in Washington, including
within his administration itself.

For many years this involvement was concealed. The twenty-
eight-page section of the 9/11 report detailing Saudi involvement in
the September 11, 2001, jihad attacks was finally released in July 2016
(albeit with substantial portions redacted), and made it clear why one
president who held hands with the Saudi king (George W. Bush) and
another who bowed to him (Barack Obama) worked so hard for so
many years to keep these pages secret: they confirmed that the 9/11
jihad murderers received significant help from people at the highest
levels of the Saudi government.’

The report states that Omar al-Bayoumi, who “may be a Sau-
di intelligence officer,” gave “substantial assistance to hijackers Khalid
al-Mindhar and Nawaf al-Hamzi after they arrived in San Diego in
February 2000.’ Al-Bayoumi met the hijackers at a public place shortly
after his meeting with an individual at the Saudi consulate.”"’ Around
the same time, al-Bayoumi “had extensive contact with Saudi Govern-
ment establishments in the United States and received financial support
from a Saudi company affiliated with the Saudi Ministry of Defense.”
That company “reportedly had ties to [O]sama bin Ladin and al-

334 THe History oF Jinan: From MunammMmap To ISIS

Qa’ida.”!3 The Saudis also gave al-Bayoumi 400,000 dollars to finance
the construction of a mosque in San Diego.”

Another possible Saudi agent, Osama Bassnan, who “has many
ties to the Saudi government” and was also a supporter of Osama bin
Laden, boasted that he did more for al-Mindhar and al-Hamzi than
al-Bayoumi did.'* He also “reportedly received funding and possibly a
fake passport from Saudi government officials.”'* The report says that
at one point, “a member of the Saudi Royal Family provided Bassnan
with a significant amount of cash,” and that “he and his wife have
received financial support from the Saudi ambassador to the Unit-
ed States and his wife.”'? That ambassador was Prince Bandar, about
whom The New York Times later noted: “No foreign diplomat has been
closer or had more access to President Bush, his family and his admin-
istration than the magnetic and fabulously wealthy Prince Bandar bin
Sultan of Saudi Arabia.”

Bassnan “spoke of bin Laden ‘as if he were a god.’ Bassnan also stated to
an FBI asset that he heard that the U.S. government had stopped approving
visas for foreign students. He considered such measures to be insufficient as
there are already enough Muslims in the United States to destroy the Unit-
ed States and make it an Islamic state within ten to fifteen years.”””

Then there was Shaykh al-Thumairy, “an accredited diplomat at the
Saudi consulate in Los Angeles and one of the ‘imams’ at the King Fa-
had mosque in Culver City, California,” who also “may have been in
contact” with al-Mindhar and al-Hamzi.”

Saleh al-Hussayen, “reportedly a Saudi Interior Ministry official,
stayed at the same hotel in Herndon, Virginia where al-Hazmi was
staying. While al-Hussayen claimed after September 11 not to know
the hijackers, FBI agents believed he was being deceptive. He was
able to depart the United States despite FBI efforts to locate and
re-interview him.””!

The name of “another Saudi national with close ties to the Saudi
Royal Family” was redacted, but the report notes that he was “the subject
of FBI counterterrorism investigations and reportedly was checking se-
curity at the United States’ southwest border in 1999 and discussing the
possibility of infiltrating individuals into the United States.”? There is

CHAPTER TEN 335

no telling who this could have been, but Prince Bandar’s unlisted phone
number turned up in a phone book of Abu Zubaida, “a senior al-Qa'ida
operative captured in Pakistan in March 2002.”?) Abu Zubaida also had
the number of “a bodyguard at the Saudi Embassy in Washington, DC.”*4

The report also mentions a CIA memorandum that “discusses al-
leged financial connections between the September 11 hijackers, Saudi
Government officials, and members of the Saudi Royal Family.”* This
memorandum was passed on to an FBI investigator; yet “despite the
clear national implications of the CIA memorandum, the FBI agent in-
cluded the memorandum in an individual case file and did not forward
it to FBI Headquarters.”*° Why?

The declassified twenty-eight pages also revealed a great deal about
Saudi mosque financing inside the United States. The King Fahad
mosque in Culver City, California, “was built in 1998 from funding pro-
vided by Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Abdelaziz. The mosque is report-
edly attended by members of the Saudi consultant in Los Angeles and
is widely recognized for its anti-Western views,” and is a “site of extrem-
ist-related activity.””’ In fact, “several subjects of FBI investigations prior
to September 11 had close connections to the mosque and are believed
to have laundered money through this mosque to non-profit organiza-
tions overseas affiliated with [O]sama bin Ladin. In an interview, an
FBI agent said he believed that Saudi government money was being
laundered through the mosque.”

David D. Aufhauser, a former Treasury Department general coun-
sel, told a Senate committee in June 2004 that estimates of how much
money the Saudis had spent worldwide since the 1970s to promote
Wahhabism went “north of seventy-five billion dollars.” The money
went to mosques, Islamic centers, Islamic schools, Islamic preachers, and
the printing of hundreds of millions of copies of the Qur’an and other
Islamic religious books,”’

Terrorism expert Yehudit Barsky noted in 2005: “The people now
in control of teaching religion [to American Muslims] are extremists.
Who teaches the mainstream moderate non-Saudi Islam that people
used to have? It’s in the homes, but there’s no infrastructure. Eighty
percent of the infrastructure is controlled by these extremists.”*” Nor
was this happening in the United States alone. In December 2015,

336 Tre Hisrory orf JInaD: From MuHAMMAD To ISIS

German vice chancellor Sigmar Gabriel declared: “We have to make
clear to the Saudis that the time of looking away is over. Wahhabi
mosques all over the world are financed by Saudi Arabia. Many Isla-
mists who are a threat to public safety come from these communities
in Germany.”*? .

Seven years after the September 11 attacks, a U.S. government
cable noted: “Government and non-governmental sources claimed that
financial support estimated at nearly 100 million USD annually was
making its way to Deobandi and Ahl-e-Hadith clerics in the region
from ‘missionary’ and ‘Islamic charitable’ organizations in Saudi Ara-
bia and the United Arab Emirates ostensibly with the direct support of
those governments.”*? The Deobandi was a Sunni revivalist movement
found primarily in India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh; the
Ahl-e-Hadith was another revivalist movement based in India. As we
have seen throughout Islamic history, revivalist movements quite fre-
quently resort to jihad.

The following year, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's office noted:

While the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) takes seriously
the threat of terrorism within Saudi Arabia, it has been an
ongoing challenge to persuade Saudi officials to treat ter-
rorist financing emanating from Saudi Arabia as a strategic
priority. Due in part to intense focus by the USG over the
last several years, Saudi Arabia has begun to make import-
ant progress on this front and has responded to terrorist
financing concerns raised by the United States through
proactively investigating and detaining financial facilita-
tors of concern. Still, donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the
most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups
worldwide.... [MJore needs to be done since Saudi Arabia
remains a critical financial support base for al-Qa’ida, the
Taliban, LeT, and other terrorist groups, including Hamas,
which probably raise millions of dollars annually from Sau-
di sources, often during Hajj and Ramadan. In contrast to
its increasingly aggressive efforts to disrupt al-Qa’ida’s ac-
cess to funding from Saudi sources, Riyadh has taken only

CHAPTER TEN 337

limited action to disrupt fundraising for the UN 1267-list-
ed Taliban and LeT-groups that are also aligned with al-
Qaida and focused on undermining stability in Afghani-
stan and Pakistan.*?

In an October 2013 speech, Clinton declared: “Some of us thought,
perhaps, we could, with a more robust, covert action trying [sic] to
vet, identify, train and arm cadres of rebels that would at least have the
firepower to be able to protect themselves against both Assad and the
Al-Qaeda-related jihadist groups that have, unfortunately, been attract-
ed to Syria. That’s been complicated by the fact that the Saudis and
others are shipping large amounts of weapons—and pretty indiscrim-
inately—not at all targeted toward the people that we think would be
the more moderate, least likely, to cause problems in the future, but this
is another one of those very tough analytical problems.”™

But there was still no hint of a rift in the U.S.~Saudi alliance. It was
a tough analytical problem because the United States, even as it faced a
comprehensive jihad challenge, was politically and economically entan-
gled with one of the chief financiers of the jihad. But no Washington
analysts appeared willing to ponder the implications of that, or to try to
devise ways to extricate the nation from this conundrum.

And when there was a regime change in Washington and Donald
Trump became president of the United States, he did the sword dance in
Riyadh with Saudi royals.

The lranian Involvement in 9/11

Less noted but no less significant is the Islamic Republic of Iran’s
role in the September 11 attacks—also a subject of U.S. government
cover-up attempts.

On December 22, 2011, U.S. District judge George B. Daniels ruled
in Havlish, et al. v. bin Laden, et al., that Iran and Hizballah were lable
for damages to be paid to relatives of the victims of the September 11,
2001, jihad attacks in New York and Washington, as both the Islamic
Republic and its Lebanese proxy had actively aided al-Qaeda in planning

and executing those attacks.*°

338 Tue History or Jit ap: From Muwammap To ISIS

Daniels found that Iran and Hizballah had cooperated and collabo-
rated with al-Qaeda before 9/11 and continued to do so after the attacks.

Before 9/11, Iran and Hizballah were implicated in efforts to train
al-Qaeda members to blow up large buildings—resulting in the bomb-
ings of the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia in 1996, the bombings of
the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, and the attack on
the USS Cole in 2000.%”

Shortly after the Co/e attack, the 9/11 jihad plot began to come to-
gether—and Iran was involved. Former MOIS operative Abolghasem
Mesbahi, a defector from Iran, testified that during the summer of 2001,
he received messages from Iranian government officials regarding a plan
for unconventional warfare against the U.S., entitled “Shaztan dar Atash”
(“Satan in Flames”).**

“Satan in Flames” was the elaborate plot to hijack three passenger
jets, each packed full of people, and crash them into American land-
marks: the World Trade Center, which jihadis took to be the center of
American commerce; the Pentagon, the center of America’s military ap-
paratus; and the White House.*’

A classified National Security Agency analysis referred to in the
9/11 Commission report reveals that eight to ten of the 9/11 hijack-
ers traveled to Iran repeatedly in late 2000 and early 2001. The 9/11
Commission called for a U.S. government investigation into Iran’s role
in 9/11, but none was ever undertaken. Kenneth R. Timmerman of the
Foundation for Democracy in Iran was, in his words, “engaged by the
Havhish attorneys in 2004 to carry out the investigation the 9/11 Com-
mission report called on the U.S. government to handle.”™

Timmerman noted that during the 9/11 hijackers’ trips to Iran, they
were “accompanied by ‘senior Hezbollah operatives’ who were in fact
agents of the Iranian regime.”"' Iranian border agents did not stamp their
passports, so that their having been inside the Islamic Republic would
not arouse suspicion against them when they entered the United States.“

The CIA, embarrassed by its failure to recognize the import of these
trips, tried to suppress this revelation.“* But Timmerman contends that
even the available evidence is explosive enough, revealing that the Islam-
ic Republic of Iran, in his words:

CHAPTER TEN 339

* helped design the 9/11 plot;

* provided intelligence support to identify and train the opera-
tives who carried it out;

* allowed the future hijackers to evade U.S. and Pakistani surveil-
lance on key trips to Afghanistan where they received the final
order of mission from Osama bin Laden, by escorting them
through Iranian borders without passport stamps;

* evacuated hundreds of top al-Qaeda operatives from Afghanistan
to Iran after 9/11 just as U.S. forces launched their offensive;

* provided safe haven and continued financial support to al-
Qaeda cadres for years after 9/11;

* allowed al-Qaeda to use Iran as an operational base for addi-
tional terror attacks, in particular the May 2003 bombings in
Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

The Ayatollah Khamenei knew about the plot. During the summer of
2001, he instructed Iranian agents to be careful to conceal their tracks
and told them to communicate only with al-Qaeda's second in com-
mand, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and Imad Mughniyzh of Hizballah.*°

Mughniyah was Iran’s key player in the 9/11 “Satan in Flames” plot.
During the Haviish trial, former CIA agents Clare M. Lopez and Bruce
D. Tefft submitted an affidavit stating that “Imad Mughniyah, the most
notable and notorious world terrorist of his time, an agent of Iran and a
senior operative of Hizballah, facilitated the international travel of certain
9/11 hijackers to and from Iran, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Afghanistan,
and perhaps various other locations for the purpose of executing the events
of September 11, 2001. This support enabled two vital aspects of the Sep-
tember 11, 2001 plot to succeed: (1) the continued training of the hijackers
in Afghanistan and Iran after securing their United States visas in Saudi
Arabia, and (2) entry into the United States.”

The Obama-era CJA went to great pains to try to ensure that
information about Iran’s role in 9/11 did not come out in the Hav/ish
case. In August 2010, a CIA official pressured a Hav/ish witness to
withdraw his testimony in exchange for a new identity, new pass-

340 Tie History or Juan: From MunamMMapb To ISIS

port, and new job. In December of that year, another CIA opera-
tive approached a different Hav/ish witness, showed him documents
stolen from the case, and took him to a U.S. embassy, where he was
subjected to five hours of interrogation and finally offered cash if he
recanted his testimony. Says Timmerman, “After 1 reported those at-
tempts at witness tampering to a Congressional oversight committee,
they ceased.”*

Judge Daniels determined that Iran, Hizballah, the Islamic Revolu-
tionary Guard Corps, the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and Securi-
ty, and other Iranian government departments, as well as the Ayatollah
Khamenei himself and former Iranian president Ali Akbar Hashemi Raf-
sanjani were all directly implicated in Iranian efforts to aid al-Qaeda in
its 9/11 plot.** He awarded the plaintiffs in the Hav/ish case 394,277,884
dollars for economic damages, as well as ninety-four million dollars for
pain and suffering, eighty hundred and seventy-four million for mental
anguish and grief, and 4,686,235,921 dollars in punitive damages, along
with nine hundred and sixty-eight million in prejudgment interest, for a
total of 7,016,513,805 dollars.*”

The Havitsh plaintiffs were unlikely to receive a check for that
amount from the Islamic Republic of Iran neatly signed by the Ayatollah
Khamenei. However, in March 2014, as part of the Hav/ish judgment,
the plaintiffs were awarded ownership of a five-hundred-million-dollar
office tower in midtown Manhattan—one that had been owned by Ira-
nian companies.

This award provided a small bit of compensation for the loss of life
and the years of trauma that these families had suffered as a result of
the Islamic Republic's war against the United States. More important,
it stood as a tangible acknowledgment of Iran’s role in the 9/11 attacks.

Confirming all of this was the revelation in November 2017 of a
document captured in the May 2, 2011, American raid on Osama bin
Laden’s hideout in Pakistan. It details a mutual agreement between
al-Qaeda and the Islamic Republic of Iran to strike American interests
in “Saudi Arabia and the Gulf”; the Iranians agreed to supply al-Qaeda
“money, arms,” and “training in Hizbollah camps in Lebanon.”*!

CuaPTeR TEN 341

Infiltration

Standing with President Bush in the mosque in September 2001 was
Abdurrahman Alamoudi, who was then one of the most prominent
Muslim leaders in the United States. During the presidency of Bill Clin-
ton, Alamoudi served as a State Department “goodwill ambassador” to
Muslim lands.” In June 2001, he attended a White House briefing on
George W. Bush’s faith-based initiative program.”

Even though it was universally taken for granted that Alamoudi was
a “moderate,” he never bothered to conceal his true allegiances. In 1994
he declared his support for the jihad terror group Hamas. He claimed
that “Hamas is not a terrorist group” and that it did “good work.” In
1996, Alamoudi defended Hamas leader Mousa Abu Marzouk, who
was ultimately deported because of his work with Hamas and currently
leads a branch of the terror group in Syria. “I really consider him to be
from among the best people in the Islamic movement,” said Alamoudi
of Marzouk. “Hamas...and I work together with him.”*

At a rally in October 2000, he encouraged those in the crowd to
show their support for Hamas and Hizballah. As the crowd cheered,
Alamoudi shouted: “T have been labeled by the media in New York to be
a supporter of Hamas. Anybody supports Hamas here?” As the crowd
cheered, “Yes,” Alamoudi asked the same question again, and then add-
ed: “Hear that, Bill Clinton, we are all supporters of Hamas, A//ahu ak-
bar. | wish they added that I am also a supporter of Hizballah. Anybody
supports Hizballah here?” The crowd again roared its approval.°® But
even that did not raise any concern among those in Washington who
were confident that he was a sterling and reliable “moderate Muslim.”
And so, in January 2001, the year he was invited to the Bush White
House, Alamoudi traveled to Beirut to attend a conference with leaders
of al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hizballah, and Islamic Jihad.’

Then, in September 2003, Alamoudi was arrested in London's
Heathrow Airport while carrying three hundred and forty thousand dol-
lars in cash——money that, as it turned out, he had received from Libyan
president Muammar Gaddafi in order to finance an al-Qaeda plot to
murder the Saudi crown prince, the future King Abdullah. Indicted
on numerous charges, Alamoudi was found to have funneled over one

342 Tur History oF Jinap: From MuuammMand To ISIS

million dollars to al-Qaeda; he pled guilty to being a senior al-Qaeda
financier and was sentenced in October 2004 to twenty-three years in
prison.*? In 2011, the Obama administration reduced Alamoudi’s sen-
tence by six years, without making public its reasons for doing so.

So, as he proclaimed that Islam was a religion of peace that had no
connection to the September 11 attacks, George W. Bush was standing
in the company of a financier of the organization that was responsible
for those attacks. Nor was that by any means the extent of the influence
in Washington of groups with ties to others that applauded or even had
involvement in the attacks. It was due to the influence of these groups
that the world’s chief superpower, while expending massive resources in
tracking down and neutralizing various jihadi individuals and groups,
committed itself to a policy of complete denial regarding why the jihad
was being fought in the first place.

That denial made the American response to 9/11 curious and
wrongheaded in numerous ways. The war went ahead in both Irag and
Afghanistan, both rather off the point if the United States really want-
ed to confront the sources of jihad activity worldwide. The invasion of
Afghanistan made some sense, since the Taliban government was coop-
erating with al-Qaeda and allowing it to operate training camps on its
soil, The invasion of Iraq, however, was based on allegations of cooper-
ation between bin Laden and Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein that were
much more tenuous. In both cases, the invasions were predicated on the
assumption that the people of each country would welcome the Amer-
icans. Vice President Dick Cheney said on March 16, 2003: “I think
things have gotten so bad inside Iraq from the standpoint of the Iraqi
people, my belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators.”° Of course,
he was proven wrong: operations in both Afghanistan and Irag became
quagmires, immense drains on American personnel, money, and materi-
el, with little to no upside.

Cheney’s odd idea that the Americans would be greeted as libera-
tors seems to have been based upon the Bush administration's ahistorical
belief that Islam was a religion of peace and compatible with Western
notions of secular and democratic rule, such that the Iragis would wel-
come the fall of the oppressor and the chance to express themselves at
the ballot box. This view completely ignored Islam’s political character,

CHarrer Ten 343

and the idea of Sharia as the immutable and perfect law of Allah that
was superior to any man-made law.

This may have been attributable to Muslim Brotherhood influence
in the United States government. The Muslim Brotherhood spelled out
its goals for the United States in an internal document seized by the
FBI in 2005 in the Northern Virginia headquarters of an Islamic char-
ity, the Holy Land Foundation. The Holy Land Foundation, once the
largest Islamic charity in the United States, was shut down for sending
charitable contributions to Hamas. The captured document was entitled,
“An Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the
Group in North America.”

In it, Muslim Brotherhood members were told that the Brotherhood
was working on presenting Islam as a “civilizational alternative” to non-
Islamic forms of society and governance, and supporting “the global Islam-
ic state wherever it is.”** In working to establish that Islamic state, Muslim
Brotherhood members in the United States: “must understand that their
work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying
the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house
by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and
Allah’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.”

The Muslim Brotherhood has been active in the United States for
decades, and is the moving force behind virtually all of the mainstream
Muslim organizations in America: the Islamic Society of North Amer-
ica (ISNA), the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), the Muslim
American Society (MAS), the Muslim Students Association (MSA),
the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), the International
Institute for Islamic Thought (IIIT), and many others.

Obama in Cairo

Against this backdrop, it is no surprise that when President Barack
Obama made his outreach speech to the Muslim world from Cairo on
June 4, 2009, he included fulsome praise of Islam that played fast and
loose with the historical record:

As a student of history, I also know civilization’s debt to
Islam. It was Islam—at places like Al-Azhar—that carried

344

The Jefferson and Adams who were told by the Tripolitanian ambassa-
dor Sidi Haji Abdrahaman that Tripoli “was founded on the Laws of the
Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should
not have answered their authority were sinners, that it was their right
and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found” might
have found Obama's insinuation that they admired and respected Islam

Tue History or Jinan: From MunammMap TO ISIS

the light of learning through so many centuries, paving the
way for Europe’s Renaissance and Enlightenment. It was
innovation in Muslim communities—it was innovation in
Muslim communities that developed the order of algebra;
our magnetic compass and tools of navigation; our mas-
tery of pens and printing; our understanding of how disease
spreads and how it can be healed. Islamic culture has given
us majestic arches and soaring spires; timeless poetry and
cherished music; elegant calligraphy and places of peaceful
contemplation, And throughout history, Islam has demon-
strated through words and deeds the possibilities of reli-
gious tolerance and racial equality.

I also know that Islam has always been a part of Ameri-
ca’s story. The first nation to recognize my country was Mo-
rocco. In signing the Treaty of Tripoli in 1796, our second
President, John Adams, wrote, “The United States has in
itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or
tranquility of Muslims.” And since our founding, Ameri-
can Muslims have enriched the United States. They have
fought in our wars, they have served in our government,
they have stood for civil rights, they have started business-
es, they have taught at our universities, they've excelled in
our sports arenas, they've won Nobel Prizes, built our tallest
building, and lit the Olympic Torch. And when the first
Muslim American was recently elected to Congress, he
took the oath to defend our Constitution using the same
Holy Koran that one of our Founding Fathers—Thomas
Jefferson—kept in his personal library.

startling. Undaunted by facts, Obama continued:

CHAPTER TEN 345

So I have known Islam on three continents before coming
to the region where it was first revealed. That experience
guides my conviction that partnership between Ameri-
ca and Islam must be based on what Islam is, not what it
isn't. And I consider it part of my responsibility as President
of the United States to fight against negative stereotypes of
Islam wherever they appear.*

Where this executive duty to defend Islam appeared in the Constitution,
he did not explain.

In September 2012 at the United Nations, in the wake of the ji-
had massacre of four Americans by al-Qaeda operatives in Benghazi in
Libya, which key members of his administration falsely and repeatedly
attributed to a spontaneous demonstration arising over a video criticiz-
ing Muhammad on YouTube, Obama went even farther, saying: “The
future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.Ӣ
The specter of the leader of the free world vowing to enforce Islamic
blasphemy laws was not just rhetoric. The idea that Islam in America
was beset by negative stereotypes that same year helped to defeat an at-
tempt to investigate Muslim Brotherhood influence within the United
States government.

Efforts to Investigate Infiltration Stymied

In 2012, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) tried to call attention to this
influence, asking for an investigation into Muslim Brotherhood infiltra-
tion into the U.S. government. She accused the first Muslim member of
Congress, Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) of having a “long record of being
associated” with CAIR and the Muslim Brotherhood.”

In response, Ellison accused Bachmann of religious bigotry.” Yet he
really did have a “long record of being associated” with Hamas-linked
CAIR and the Muslim Brotherhood. As long ago as 2006, Ellison's
closeness to CAIR’s cofounder and National Executive Director Nihad
Awad was a matter of public record.” Awad, who notoriously said in
1994 that he was “in support of the Hamas movement,” spoke at fund-
raisers for Ellison, raising considerable sums for his first congressional
race. Ellison has appeared frequently at CAIR events since then.”

346 Tne History oF JIHAD: From MUHAMMAD TO ISIS

Investigative journalist Patrick Poole explained that “according to
Justice Department, Awad is a longtime Hamas operative. Multiple
statements made by federal prosecutors identify Awad as one of the at-
tendees at a 1993 meeting of US Muslim Brotherhood Palestine Com-
mittee leaders in Philadelphia that was wiretapped by the FBI under
a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant. The topic of
discussion during that 1993 meeting was how to help Hamas by work-
ing in the U.S. to help sabotage the Oslo Peace Accords.” But none of
that fazed Ellison. Nor has he ever expressed any concern over the fact
that CAIR is also linked to the Muslim Brotherhood through its parent
group, the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP).

Ellison’s ties to the Muslim Brotherhood were also more direct. In
2008, Ellison accepted 13,350 dollars from the Muslim American Soci-
ety (MAS) to go on a pilgrimage to Mecca.”’ As we have seen, the Mus-
lim American Society is the principal arm of the Muslim Brotherhood
in the United States.

In December 2012, possible corroboration of some of Bachmann’s
allegations came from an unlikely quarter: Egypt’s Rose E/-Youssef mag-
azine, which asserted in a December 2012 article that six highly placed
Muslim Brotherhood infiltrators within the Obama Administration had
transformed the United States “from a position hostile to Islamic groups
and organizations in the world to the largest and most important sup-
porter of the Muslim Brotherhood.””

The article said that “the six named people include: Arif Alikhan,
assistant secretary of Homeland Security for policy development, Mo-
hammed Elibiary, a member of the Homeland Security Advisory Coun-
cil; Rashad Hussain, the U.S. special envoy to the Organization of the
Islamic Conference [OIC]; Salam al-Marayati, co-founder of the Mus-
lim Public Affairs Council (MPAC); Imam Mohamed Magid, president
of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA); and Eboo Patel, a
member of President Obama's Advisory Council on Faith-Based Neigh-
borhood Partnerships.”

Besides Elibiary and Magid, Bachmann also raised concerns about
the OIC, to which Hussain was Barack Obama’s ambassador. And so
the Egyptian article stood as vindication of her concerns, and showed
that her request an investigation be opened of the Muslim Brotherhood’s

CHAPTER TEN 347

infiltration was entirely reasonable and not a manifestation of “bigotry,”
“racism,” or “McCarthyism’—contrary to the hysterical (and formulaic)
claims of her leftist detractors.

Of course, the Egyptian article had to be taken with a grain of salt.
It could have been the product of a Muslim Brotherhood advocate in
Egypt, anxious to bolster perceptions of his movement’s clout and cred-
ibility. While that was possible, however, it could not responsibly be
assumed to be the case without closer examination; it was equally pos-
sible that the article represented a genuine indication that Bachmann's
concerns were justified, and that the Muslim Brotherhood had indeed
penetrated the highest levels of the U.S. government.

Infiltration in American institutions was undeniable. Louay Safi,
a Muslim activist, had ties to two Muslim Brotherhood entities—the
Islamic Society of North America and the International Institute of Is-
Jlamic Thought—as well as to convicted jihad leader Sami al-Arian. Yet
Safi was training troops and even meeting with the families of victims at
Fort Hood in December 2009, the month after a Muslim Army major,
Nidal Hasan, massacred thirteen people there while shouting, “A//ahu
akbar.””* Safi later became a leader of the Syrian opposition to Bashar
Assad that was dominated by al-Qaeda and other pro-Sharia Islamic
supremacist groups.”

And Gehad El-Haddad, a top Muslim Brotherhood official in
Egypt, was for five years employed with the Clinton Foundation.” The
Clinton Foundation, of course, is not a government agency, but his in-
volvement with it afforded El-Haddad access to a former president of
the United States and his associates, including present and former gov-
ernment officials. In September 2013, Egypt's military government ar-
rested El-Haddad for his Muslim Brotherhood activities.”

For all of the furor over Bachmann's call for an investigation of
Muslim Brotherhood influence in Washington, nothing caused as
much controversy as her naming Huma Abedin, then Secretary of
State Hillary Clinton’s closest personal assistant and adviser. Abedin ts
an observant Mus!im who lived in Saudi Arabia as a child; her broth-
er Hassan works “as a fellow and partner with a number of Muslim
Brotherhood members.” Her mother, Saleha Mahmoud Abedin, is a
professor in Saudi Arabia and a member of the Brotherhood’s wom-

348

r

THe Hrstory or JinaAp: FRoM MutHAMMAD TO ISIS

an’s division, the Muslim Sisterhood.® Her father, Syed Z. Abedin,
was a professor in Saudi Arabia who founded the Institute for Mus-
lim Minority Affairs, an organization supported by the Muslim World
League, a Brotherhood organization.”

Despite this evidence, there was no investigation, Yet, 1n an arti-

cle about Abedin and her influence, former U.S. prosecutor Andrew C.
McCarthy listed a great many strange collaborations between the State
Department of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and Muslim Broth-
erhood organizations, including:

The State Department announced that the Obama administra-
tion would be “satisfied” with the election of a Muslim Brother-
hood-dominated government in Egypt.

Secretary Clinton personally intervened to reverse a Bush-
administration ruling that barred Tariq Ramadan, grandson of
the Brotherhood’s founder and son of one of its most influential
early leaders, from entering the United States.

The State Department collaborated with the Organization of
Islamic Cooperation, a bloc of governments heavily influenced
by the Brotherhood, in seeking to restrict American free-speech
rights in deference to Sharia proscriptions against negative crit-
icism of Islam.

The State Department excluded Israel, the world’s leading tar-
get of terrorism, from its “Global Counterterrorism Forum,” a
group that brings the United States together with several Isla-
mist governments, prominently including its cochair, Turkey
which now finances Hamas and avidly supports the flotillas that
seek to break Israel’s blockade of Hamas. At the forum's kickoff,
Secretary Clinton decried various terrorist attacks and groups,
but she did not mention Hamas or attacks against Israel—in
transparent deference to the Islamist governments, which echo
the Brotherhood’s position that Hamas is not a terrorist organi-
zation and that attacks against Israel are not terrorism.

The State Department and the Obama administration
waived congressional restrictions in order to transfer 1.5 billion

CHAPTER TEN 349

dollars in aid to Egypt after the Muslim Brotherhood’s victory
in the parliamentary elections.

* The State Department and the Obama administration
waived congressional restrictions in order to transfer millions of
dollars in aid to the Palestinian territories, notwithstanding that
Gaza is ruled by the terrorist organization Hamas, the Muslim
Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch.

* The State Department and the administration hosted a contin-
gent from Egypt’s newly elected parliament that included not
only Muslim Brotherhood members but a member of the Is-
lamic Group (Gamaa al-Islamiyya), which is formally designat-
ed as a foreign terrorist organization. The State Department re-
fused to provide Americans with information about the process
by which it issued a visa to a member of a designated terrorist
organization, about how the members of the Egyptian delega-
tion were selected, or about what security procedures were fol-
lowed before the delegation was allowed to enter our country.”

During the Bush and Obama administrations, it became socially and
politically unacceptable even to raise questions about Muslim Brother-
hood influence, or to express any skepticism about the politically correct
dogmas regarding Islam and jihad. For in Abedin’s case, it certainly was
not that the evidence was lacking. It was that the political elites had
forbidden any examination or discussion of it.

Stigmatizing Resistance to Jihad

The crowning victory in the effort to stigmatize resistance to jihad ter-
ror and Islamic supremacism came in February 2012, when the Obama
administration purged more than a thousand documents and presenta-
tions from counterterror training materials for the FBI and other agencies.
This material was discarded at the demand of Muslim groups, which had
deemed it inaccurate (by their own account) or offensive to Muslims.”
This triumph was several years in the making. The movement to-
ward it began in earnest in August 2010, when I gave a presentation on
Islam and jihad to the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force—one of many
such talks I gave to government agencies and military groups in those

350 Tue History of Jinap: From MuvammMan tro ISIS

years. CAIR sent a series of letters to FBI director Robert Mueller and
others, demanding that I be dropped as a counterterror trainer; the or-
ganization even started a “coalition” echoing this demand, which black
activist leader Jesse Jackson and others joined.™

And indeed, Mueller made no public comment on CAIR’s demand,
and so it initially appeared that the effort had failed—although I was
never again invited to provide counterterror training for any government
agency, after having done so fairly regularly for the previous five years.
Although Mueller was publicly silent, the Islamic supremacists and
their leftist allies didn’t give up. In the summer and fall of 2011, the on-
line tech journal Wired published several “exposés” by far-left journalist
Spencer Ackerman, who took the FBI to task for training material that
spoke forthrightly and truthfully about the nature and magnitude of the
jihad threat.

In a typical sally from these exposés, Ackerman reported that “the
FBI is teaching its counterterrorism agents that ‘main stream’ [sic]
American Muslims are likely to be terrorist sympathizers; that the
Prophet Mohammed was a ‘cult leader’; and that the Islamic practice of
giving charity is no more than a ‘funding mechanism for combat.’ At the
Bureau's training ground in Quantico, Virginia, agents are shown a chart
contending that the more ‘devout’ a Muslim, the more likely he is to be
‘violent.’ Those destructive tendencies cannot be reversed, an FBI in-
structional presentation adds: ‘Any war against non-believers is justified’
under Muslim law; a ‘moderating process cannot happen if the Koran
continues to be regarded as the unalterable word of Allah.””®

Like virtually all leftist and Islamic supremacist critiques of antiji-
had and antiterror material from this period, Ackerman’s piece took for
granted that such assertions are false, without bothering to explain how
or why. Apparently, Ackerman believed that their falsity was so self-ev-
ident as to require no demonstration; unfortunately for him, however,
there was considerable evidence that what this FBI training material
asserted was true. Nonetheless, in the face of Ackerman’s reports, the
FBI went into full retreat: in September 2011, it announced that it was
dropping one of the programs that Ackerman had zeroed in on.*

The Islamic supremacists didn’t rest on their laurels, On October
19, 2011, Salam al-Marayati of the Muslim Public Affairs Council

CHAPTER TEN 351

(MPAC) took this campaign to the mainstream media, writing in the
Los Angeles Times that “a disturbing string of training material used by
the FBI and a U.S. attorney’s office came to light beginning in late July
that reveals a deep anti-Muslim sentiment within the U.S. government.”
Al-Marayati warned that “if this matter is not immediately addressed, it
will undermine the relationship between law enforcement and the Mus-
lim American community—another example of the ineptitude and/or
apathy undermining bridges built with care over decades.” He also noted
that the FBI was beginning to move on these demands, although as far
as al-Marayati was concerned, much more was needed: “It is not enough
to just call it a ‘very valid concern,’ as FBI Director Robert Mueller told
a congressional committee this month.”®

The same day that al-Marayati’s op-ed was published, Farhana
Khera of Muslim Advocates, who had complained for years about sup-
posed Muslim profiling and entrapment, wrote a letter to John Bren-
nan, who was then the assistant to the president on national security
for homeland security and counterterrorism. The letter was signed not
just by Khera but by the leaders of virtually all the significant Islam-
ic groups in the United States: fifty-seven Muslim, Arab, and South
Asian organizations, including many with ties to Hamas and the Mus-
lim Brotherhood, including CAIR, ISNA, MAS, the Islamic Circle of
North America (ICNA), Islamic Relief USA, and the Muslim Public
Affairs Council (MPAC)."

The letter denounced what it characterized as U.S. government
agencies “use of biased, false and highly offensive training materials
about Muslims and Islam,” and emphasized that they regarded this as
an issue of the utmost importance: “The seriousness of this issue cannot
be overstated, and we request that the White House immediately create
an interagency task force to address this problem, with a fair and trans-
parent mechanism for input from the Muslim, Arab, and South Asian
communities, including civil rights lawyers, religious leaders, and law
enforcement experts.”

This was needed because “while recent news reports have high-
lighted the FBI’s use of biased experts and training materials, we have
learned that this problem extends far beyond the FBI and has infected

‘

352 Tue History or Jinap: From MuHAMMAD TO ISIS

other government agencies, including the U.S. Attorney’s Anti-Terrorism
Advisory Councils, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and the
U.S. Army. Furthermore, by the FBI’s own admission, the use of bigot-
ed and distorted materials in its trainings has not been an isolated oc-
currence. Since last year, reports have surfaced that the FBI, and other
federal agencies, are using or supporting the use of biased trainers and
materials in presentations to law enforcement officials.””

In a November 3, 2011, response to Khera, that—significantly—was
written on White House stationery, Brennan accepted Khera’s criticisms
without a murmur of protest and assured her of his readiness to comply.
“Please allow me to share with you the specific steps we are taking,”
Brennan wrote to Khera, “to ensure that federal officials and state, local
and tribal partners receive accurate, evidence-based information in these
crucial areas.””!

“I am aware,” Brennan went on, “of recent unfortunate incidents
that have highlighted substandard and offensive training that some
United States Government elements have either sponsored or delivered.
Any and all such training runs completely counter to our values, our
commitment to strong partnerships with communities across the coun-
try, our specific approach to countering violent extremist recruitment
and radicalization, and our broader counterterrorism (CT) efforts. Our
National Strategy for Empowering Local Partners to Prevent Violent
Extremism in the United States highlights competent training as an area
of primary focus and states that ‘misinformation about the threat and
dynamics of radicalization to violence can harm our security by send-
ing local stakeholders in the wrong direction and unnecessarily creating
tensions with potential community partners.’ It also emphasizes that our
security is ‘inextricably linked to our values,’ including ‘the promotion of
an inclusive society.”

Brennan then assured Khera that all her demands would be met:
“Your letter requests that ‘the White House immediately create an inter-
agency task force to address this problem,’ and we agree that this is nec-
essary.” He then detailed the specific actions being undertaken to ensure
this, including “collecting all training materials that contain cultural or
religious content, including information related to Islam or Muslims.”™

CHAPTER TEN 353

This material wouldn’t just be “collected”; it would be purged of any-
thing that Farhana Khera and others like her found offensive—that is,
any honest discussion of how Islamic jihadists used Islamic teachings to
justify violence.

The alacrity with which Brennan complied was unfortunate on
many levels. Not only were numerous books and presentations that pre-
sented a perfectly accurate view of Islam and jihad purged, but Brennan
was complying with demands from quarters that could hardly be consid-
ered authentically moderate.

America was going to war against jihadists while forbidding itself to
understand jihad.

Brennan also attempted to distance Islam and the concept of jihad
from contemporary Islamic terrorism long before he told Farhana Khera
that he would give her everything she wanted. In August 2009, Brennan
noted that Barack Obama did not see the struggle against al-Qaeda “as a
fight against jihadists. Describing terrorists in this way, using the legiti-
mate term ‘jihad,’ which means to purify oneself or to wage a holy strug-
gle for a moral goal, risks giving these murderers the religious legitimacy
they desperately seek but in no way deserve.””

Brennan declared at New York University Law School in February 2010:

As Muslims you have seen a small fringe of fanatics who
cloak themselves in religion, try to distort your faith, though
they are clearly ignorant of the most fundamental teachings
of Islam. Instead of finding the inherent dignity and decen-
cy in other human beings, they practice a medieval brand
of intolerance. Instead of saving human lives, as the Quran
instructs, they take innocent life. Instead of creating, they
destroy—bombing mosques, schools and hospitals. They
are not jihadists, for jihad is a holy struggle, an effort to
purify for a legitimate purpose, and there is nothing, abso-
lutely nothing holy or pure or legitimate or Islamic about

murdering innocent men, women and children.”

Going even farther, he said on May 26, 2010, in an address at the Center
for Strategic and International Studies: “Nor do we describe our enemies

4

354 The History oF JIHAD: From MunamMap To ISIS

as jihadists or Islamists because jihad is a holy struggle, a legitimate tenet
of Islam meaning to purify oneself or one’s community.” In a press release
the next day, CAIR “expressed appreciation” for Brennan’s remarks.”

In the same speech, Brennan added: “And there is nothing holy or
legitimate or Islamic about murdering innocent men, women and chil-
dren. Indeed, characterizing our adversaries this way would actually be
counterproductive. It would play into the false perception that they are
religious leaders defending a holy cause when in fact, they are nothing
more than murderers, including the murder of thousands upon thou-
sands of Muslims.”

So many warriors of jihad throughout history would have disagreed
with Brennan, and one reporter in 2010 had the temerity to challenge
him on this point. A Washington Times interviewer asked Brennan: “Can
you give me an example of a jihad in history? Like, has there ever been a
jihad...an armed jihad anywhere in history? Has it ever existed for real,
or is it just a concept?”

When Brennan responded, “I’m not going to go into this sort of
history discussion here,” the interviewer explained: “But it’s important to
frame the concept, because we want to say that what al-Qaeda is doing is
not jihad. They say it is.” The interviewer then paraphrased for Brennan
the jihadist claim, as repeated by al-Qaeda cofounder Abdullah Azzam,
that the idea that the spiritual jihad was the “greater jihad” had no basis
in Islamic theology: “Abdul Azzam has said, in fact, ‘there’s not even
a greater jihad.’ [Azzam has said] that that’s just a myth—that hadith
didn’t even really happen.”

Azzam claimed, the interviewer continued, “that there’s only armed
jihad. Ayatollah Khomeini said ‘there is only armed jihad,’ and it would
be useful to be able to characterize or to contrast what they’re doing and
what they claim against a legitimate armed jihad in the past.”!!

Rather than explain on what grounds he found these usages of the
word “jihad” as armed struggle to be illegitimate from an Islamic stand-
point, Brennan said abruptly: “] think we’ve finished. I have to get go-
ing,” and left.!°

Brennan was instrumental in the Obama administration's recasting
of the defense against terror as a localized struggle against al-Qaeda.

CuApTrer TEN 355

The Migrant Influx

Meanwhile, after September 11, European nations began admitting tens
of thousands of Muslim immigrants, such that by 2017, many Europe-
an cities had majority-Muslim enclaves, and the Muslim population of
Europe was in the millions and growing much more quickly than the
non-Muslim population.

The influx picked up sharply in 2015. German chancellor Angela
Merkel, keen to alleviate the humanitarian crisis in Syria and the sur-
rounding regions, opened Germany’s doors to hundreds of thousands
of Muslim migrants. Other Western European countries did as well.
Yet while there was no doubt that some of the refugees were grateful
for the hospitality they were being shown, others clearly weren't. All of
the Islamic jihadis who murdered 130 people in Paris in a series of ji-
had attacks in November 2015 were putative refugees who had recently
been welcomed into Europe.’ Germany’s domestic intelligence agency
admitted in July 2017 that hundreds of jihadis had entered the country
among the refugees, and that twenty-four thousand jihadis were active
in Germany.’

Muslim migrants in Europe were also responsible for an appalling
epidemic of rape, sexual assault, theft, petty crime, and looting. In the
first half of 2016, migrants in Germany, who were overwhelmingly Mus-
lim, committed 142,500 crimes, an average of 780 every day. This was
a significant increase from 2015, during which migrants committed two
hundred thousand crimes during the entire year.'”

On New Year's Eve, December 31, 2015, Muslim migrants commit-
ted as many as two thousand mass rapes and sexual assaults in Cologne,
Stockholm, and other major European cities.’°° Such assaults weren't lim-
ited to that day alone; Sweden was called the “rape capital of the world”
because of the notorious activities of Muslim migrants." Muslim mi-
grants made Malmé, once a peaceful city, crime-ridden and hazardous.'”

In Sweden, Muslim migrants from Afghanistan were found in
2017 to be seventy-nine times more likely to commit rape and other
sexual crimes than native Swedes. Migrants and refugees committed
ninety-two percent of rapes in Sweden. Rapists in Sweden have come
from Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Eritrea, Syria, Gambia, Iran, Palestine,
Chile, and Kosovo, in that order; rapists of Swedish background do not

356 Tue History or Jipap: From MunamMMAD TO ISIS

exist in sufficient numbers to make the top ten, and all the nations on
that list except Chile and Eritrea are majority Muslim.”

In the British town of Rotherham, Muslim gangs brutalized, sexual-
ly assaulted, and raped over fourteen hundred young British girls, while
authorities remained extremely reluctant to say or do anything in re-
sponse, for fear of being labeled racist."

Yet hardly anything was being said about this. In the summer of
2016, Krystyna Pawtowicz, a member of the Polish parliament, charged
German authorities with attempting to “cover up the crimes of their
Arab guests, or even shift the blame upon themselves.”""’ There was also
evidence that migrant crimes were being covered up in the Netherlands
and Sweden as well.’”

These cover-ups apparently proceeded from a fear that non-
Muslims would begin to have negative views of Islam; yet the sexual
assaults did have to do with Islam. The Qur’an dictates that a Muslim
man may have sexual relations with the “captives of the right hand,” that
is, captured non-Muslim women (4:3; 4:24; 23:1-6; 33:50; 70:30). The
Qur'an also says that women should veil themselves so that they may
not be molested (33:59), with the implication being that if they are not
veiled, they may indeed be molested.

The Catholic Church

The Catholic Church, on the forefront of resistance to the jihad for cen-
turies, likewise abdicated early in the twenty-first century. Of course, the
Church had not called a Crusade for centuries, and by September 11
no one would have expected it to do so. Not only were the Crusades by
then a dim historical memory, ill-remembered and even less understood,
among most Catholics, but schools all over the West that had adopted
the name Crusaders during the twentieth century began shedding the
label. Historical pride quickly gave way to historical shame.

Early in the twenty-first century, the Catholic Church went even
farther, not only not sounding the alarm about the advancing jihad, but
demonstrating that it had no historical memory of why the Crusades
had been fought, as well as no awareness that this jihad, which had his-
torically targeted the Church, was continuing and had found renewed

CHaprer TEN 357

energy. There were to be no reminders from the Catholic Church about
how Islam had been set against Europe for fourteen hundred years and
that mass Muslim migration into Europe might not be such a good idea.

However, Pope Benedict XVI did touch off a worldwide controversy
in 2006 by quoting the fourteenth-century Byzantine emperor Manuel
II Paleologus’ words about Muhammad's bringing nothing new but what
was evil and inhumane. Benedict at least demonstrated that he was aware
that Islam somehow posed a problem for Europe and the free world in
general; after the Muslim riots and murders that followed his remarks, and
fulmination from Egypt's al-Azhar over his statements after a jihad mass
murder attack in an Egyptian cathedral, Benedict fell silent.

His successor, Pope Francis, was anything but silent. In a November
2013 Apostolic Exhortation, he declared: “Faced with disconcerting ep-
isodes of violent fundamentalism, our respect for true followers of Islam
should lead us to avoid hateful generalisations, for authentic Islam and
the proper reading of the Koran are opposed to every form of violence."

This statement, remarkable for the dogmatic confidence with which
its false claim was made, was not singular. Pope Francis was not just a
defender of Islam and the Qur’an but of the Sharia death penalty for
blasphemy: after Islamic jihadists in January 2015 murdered cartoon-
ists from the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, Francis obliquely
justified the murders by saying that “it is true that you must not react
violently, but although we are good friends if [an aide] says a curse word
against my mother, he can expect a punch, it’s normal. You can’t make a
toy out of the religions of others. These people provoke and then [some-
thing can happen]. In freedom of expression there are limits.””"

For the pope, it can thus be assumed, murdering people for violat-
ing Sharia blasphemy laws was “normal,” and it wasn’t terrorism anyway,
for “Christian terrorism does not exist, Jewish terrorism does not exist,
and Muslim terrorism does not exist. They do not exist,” as he said in a
speech in February 2017." “There are fundamentalist and violent indi-
viduals in all peoples and religions—and with intolerant generalizations
they become stronger because they feed on hate and xenophobia.”""°

There was no Islamic terrorism, as far as the pope was concerned,
but if one engaged in “intolerant generalizations,” one could “expect a
punch.” The pope apparently believed that the problem was not jihad

358 THe History oF JiInAD: From MUHAMMAD TO ISIS

terror but non-Muslims talking about jihad terror; Muslims would be
peaceful if non-Muslims would simply censor themselves and self-
impose Sharia blasphemy restrictions regarding criticism of Islam.

In July 2017, Ahmed al-Tayeb, the grand imam of Cairo’s al-Azhar,
thanked Pope Francis for his “defense of Islam against the accusation of
violence and terrorism.”'” Then, in September 2017, the pope met in the
Vatican with Dr. Muhammad bin Abdul Karim Al-Issa, the secretary
general of the Muslim World League (MWL), a group that has been
linked to the financing of jihad terror."

During the meeting, Al-Issa thanked the pope for his “fair posi-
tions” on what he called the “false claims that link extremism and vio-
lence to Islam.”!"’ In other words, he thanked the Pope for dissembling
about the motivating ideology of jihad terror, which his group had been
accused of financing, and for defaming other religions in an effort to
whitewash Islam,

Francis’ predecessors Urban II and Calixtus ]V would have been
astonished. As the jihad advanced in Europe, historically the heart of
Christendom, the Catholic Church that had stood against the jihad for
centuries now told its people that it was xenophobic and racist to resist
mass Muslim immigration, and that even security concerns about the
Muslim migrants did not override this,

In his message for the World Day of Peace on January 1, 2018, Pope
Francis declared: “In a spirit of compassion, let us embrace all those
fleeing from war and hunger, or forced by discrimination, persecution,
poverty and environmental degradation to leave their homelands.” He
warned: “Many destination countries have seen the spread of rhetoric
decrying the risks posed to national security or the high cost of wel-
coming new arrivals, and thus demeaning the human dignity due to all
as sons and daughters of God. Those who, for what may be political
reasons, foment fear of migrants instead of building peace are sowing vi-
olence, racial discrimination and xenophobia, which are matters of great
concern for all those concerned for the safety of every human being.””°

Yet those security concerns were real. All of the jihadis who mur-
dered 130 people in Paris in November 2015 had just entered Europe as
refugees.’”' This followed the Islamic State’s February 2015 boast that
it would soon flood Europe with as many as five hundred thousand ref-

CHAPTER TEN 359

ugees.'”? In September 2015, Elias Bou Saab, the Lebanese education
minister, disclosed that there were twenty thousand jihadis among the
refugees in camps in his country, waiting for the opportunity to go to
Europe and North America.’?* That same month, it was revealed that
eighty percent of migrants who had come to Europe claiming to be flee-
ing the war in Syria were not really from Syria at all.'**

Why were they claiming to be Syrian and streaming into Europe,
and the U.S. as well? An Islamic State operative gave the answer when
he boasted in September 2015, shortly after the migrant influx began,
that among the flood of refugees, four thousand Islamic State jihadis had
already entered Europe. He explained their purpose: “It’s our dream that
there should be a caliphate not only in Syria but in all the world, and we
will have it soon, zvshallah.”””’ These Muslims were going to Europe in
the service of that caliphate: “They are going like refugees,” he said, but
they were going with the plan of sowing blood and mayhem on Europe-
an streets. As he told this to journalists, he smiled and said, “Just wait.”"”°

On May 10, 2016, Patrick Calvar, the head of France’s DGSI in-
ternal intelligence agency, said that the Islamic State was using migrant
routes through the Balkans to get jihadis into Europe.'”’

But for Pope Francis, concern for all of this was simply “xenopho-
bia.” “It is hypocritical,” he thundered in October 2016, “to call yourself
a Christian and to chase away a refugee, or anyone who needs your help.
Jesus taught us what it means to be a good Christian in the parable of the
Good Samaritan.”’* He cited Scripture: “You shall not wrong a stranger
or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”

The Islamic State, meanwhile, had its own scripture in mind. With
marked ingratitude, in November 2017 it threatened “Christmas blood”
at the Vatican and released an image of Pope Francis beheaded.

A year before that, the same group had explained that, contrary to
Pope Francis’ fond imaginings, their struggle was all about Islam. Ad-
dressing the free world, the Islamic State declared in an article in its
glossy online magazine Dadig:

We hate you, first and foremost, because you are disbeliev-
ers; you reject the oneness of Allah—whether you realize
it or not—by making partners for Him in worship, you
blaspheme against Him, claiming that He has a son, you

360

Tne History or Jrd¥ap: From MunamMap TO ISIS
fabricate lies against His prophets and messengers, and you

We hate you because your secular, liberal societies per-
mit the very things that Allah has prohibited while banning
many of the things He has permitted, a matter that doesn’t
concern you because you [sic] Christian disbelief and pa-
ganism separate between religion and state, thereby grant-
ing supreme authority to your whims and desires via the
legislators you vote into power...

In the case of the atheist fringe, we hate you and wage
war against you because you disbelieve in the existence of
your Lord and Creator.

We hate you for your crimes against Islam and wage war
against you to punish you for your transgressions against
our religion.

We hate you for your crimes against the Muslims; your
drones and fighter jets bomb, kill, and maim our people
around the world, and your puppets in the usurped lands of
the Muslims oppress, torture, and wage war against anyone
who calls to the truth.

We hate you for invading our lands and fight you to
repel you and drive you out. As long as there is an inch of
territory left for us to reclaim, jihad will continue to be a
personal obligation on every single Muslim....

What’s important to understand here is that although
some might argue that your foreign policies are the extent
of what drives our hatred, this particular reason for hating
you is secondary, hence the reason we addressed it at the
end of the above list.

The fact is, even if you were to stop bombing us, im-
prisoning us, torturing us, vilifying us, and usurping our
lands, we would continue to hate you because our primary
reason for hating you will not cease to exist until you em-
brace Islam.?*!

CHAPTER TEN 361

Neither Tariq ibn Ziyad nor Mahmud Ghazni could have said it more
clearly. Nonetheless, neither Pope Francis nor other Catholic leaders
took any notice.

The Islamic State

The Islamic State (commonly but erroneously known as ISIS, an ac-
ronym for its former and rejected name, the Islamic State of Iraq and
al-Sham [the Levant]) that threatened Pope Francis and the West is best
known for its audacious attempt from 2014 to 2017 to restore the ca-
liphate. It declared its caliphate in the territory it controlled in Iraq and
Syria on June 29, 2014, the same day it issued an explanatory document
entitled “This is the Promise of Allah.”

The declaration, similar to so many other Islamic declarations
throughout Islamic history, asserted that the caliphate frees human be-
ings from oppression and subjugation: it is meant “for the purpose of
compelling the people to do what the Sharia (Allah’s law) requires of
them concerning their interests in the hereafter and worldly life, which
can only be achieved by carrying out the command of Allah, establishing
His religion, and referring to His law for judgment.”

Before Islam, according to “This is the Promise of Allah,” the Arabs
were weak and disunited; once they accepted Islam, Allah granted them
unity and power. Then followed success unprecedented in world history.
Referring to the jihad victories of the seventh century, it declared: “Our
dear ummah—the best of peoples—Allah (the Exalted) decrees numer-
ous victories for this ummah to occur in a single year, which He does not
grant others in many years or even centuries, This ummah succeeded in
ending two of the largest empires known to history in just 25 years, and
then spent the treasures of those empires on jihad in the path of Allah,
They put out the fire of the Magians (fire-worshippers) forever, and they
forced the noses of the cross-worshippers onto the ground with the most
miserable of weapons and weakest of numbers.... Yes, my ummah, those
barefoot, naked, shepherds who did not know good from evil, nor truth
from falsehood, filled the earth with justice after it had been filled with

oppression and tyranny, and ruled the world for centuries."

362 Tue History or Jitvap: From MunamMap To ISIS

As far as the Islamic State was concerned, nothing had changed—or
should have changed: “The God of this ummah yesterday is the same
God of the ummah today, and the One who gave it victory yesterday is
the One who will give it victory today.”"** Accordingly, “The time has
come for those generations that were drowning in oceans of disgrace,
being nursed on the milk of humiliation, and being ruled by the vilest of
all people, after their long slumber in the darkness of neglect—the time
has come for them to rise.”!** The “vilest of all people” is a Qur’anic ep-
ithet for the “unbelievers among the People of the Book”—that is, Jews,
Christians, and Zoroastrians who do not become Muslims (98:6).

The Islamic State also announced: “The sun of jihad has risen. The
glad tidings of good are shining. Triumph looms on the horizon. The
signs of victory have appeared.” It made its case for embodying the ca-
liphate based on the fact that in its domains, the Muslims were exalted,
and the infidels were humiliated, paying the Qur’anic tax (jizya) and
submitting in humiliation to the Muslims, as specified in the Qur’an
(9:29)—in the process, sketching out a chilling picture of non-Muslims
subjugated under the supremacy of Islam:

Here the flag of the Islamic State, the flag of tawhid
[monotheism], rises and flutters. Its shade covers land from
Aleppo to Diyala. Beneath it, the walls of the tawaghit
[rulers claiming the rights of Allah] have been demol-
ished, their flags have fallen, and their borders have been
destroyed. Their soldiers are either killed, imprisoned, or
defeated. The Muslims are honored. The kuffar [infidels]
are disgraced. Ahlus-Sunnah [the Sunnis] are masters and
are esteemed. The people of bid’ah [heresy] are humiliat-
ed. The hudud [Sharia penalties] are implemented—the
hudud of Allah—all of them. The frontlines are defended.
Crosses and graves are demolished. Prisoners are released
by the edge of the sword. The people in the lands of the
State move about for their livelihood and journeys, feeling
safe regarding their lives and wealth. Wulat [plural of wa/t,
or governors] and judges have been appointed. Jizyah [a tax
imposed on kuffar] has been enforced. Fay’ [money taken
from the kuffar without battle] and zakat [obligatory alms]

CHApTER TEN 363

have been collected. Courts have been established to resolve
disputes and complaints. Evil has been removed. Lessons
and classes have been held in the masajid [plural of masjid]
and, by the grace of Allah, the religion has become com-
pletely for Allah. There only remained one matter, a wajib
kifa’i [collective obligation] that the ummah sins by aban-
doning. It is a forgotten obligation. The ummah has not
tasted honor since they lost it. It is a dream that lives in the
depths of every Muslim believer. It is a hope that flutters in
the heart of every mujahid muwahhid [monotheist]. It is
the khilafah [caliphate]. It is the khilafah—the abandoned
obligation of the era."

Consequently, all Muslims now owed allegiance to this caliphate: “We
clarify to the Muslims that with this declaration of khilafah, it is in-
cumbent upon all Muslims to pledge allegiance to the khalifah Ibrahim
and support him (may Allah preserve him). The legality of all emirates,
groups, states, and organizations, becomes null by the expansion of the
khilafah’s authority and arrival of its troops to their areas.” And “the
khalifah [caliph] Ibrahim (may Allah preserve him) has fulfilled all the
conditions for khilafah [caliphate] mentioned by the scholars.”!’

Thus, the Islamic State exhorted all Muslims to join it and give it
allegiance, as the Mahdi in Sudan and so many other Muslim revivalists

had throughout Islamic history:

So rush O Muslims and gather around your khalifah, so
that you may return as you once were for ages, kings of the
earth and knights of war.... By Allah, if you disbelieve in
democracy, secularism, nationalism, as well as all the other
garbage and ideas from the west, and rush to your religion
and creed, then by Allah, you will own the earth, and the
east and west will submit to you. This is the promise of Al-
lah to you. This is the promise of Allah to you.’

Less than a week after declaring itself the caliphate, the Islamic State
gave the world a look at the new caliphate, releasing a video on July 5,

2014, of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi speaking in the twelfth-century Great

364 Tue History oF Jinav: From MunamMMADb TO ISIS

Mosque of al-Nuri in Mosul.’

He said that after the fall of the last caliphate, “the disbelievers
were able to weaken and humiliate the Muslims, dominate them in ev-
ery region, plunder their wealth and resources, and rob them of their
rights.” They did this by “attacking and occupying their lands, placing
their treacherous agents in power to rule the Muslims with an iron fist,
and spreading dazzling and deceptive slogans such as: civilization, peace,
co-existence, freedom, democracy, secularism, baathism, nationalism,
and patriotism, among other false slogans. Those rulers continue striv-
ing to enslave the Muslims, pulling them away from their religion with
those slogans.”

The warriors of jihad should not worry about the formidable mil-
itary might of the infidels, because just as at the Battle of Badr, success
would come through obedience to Allah, not by means of weapons:

O soldiers of the Islamic State, do not be awestruck by the
great numbers of your enemy, for Allah is with you. J do
not fear for you the numbers of your opponents, nor do I
fear your neediness and poverty, for Allah (the Exalted) has
promised your Prophet (peace be upon him) that you will
not be wiped out by famine, and your enemy will not him-
self conquer you and violate your land. Allah placed your
provision under the shades of your spears.!*!

He called upon them also to “persevere in reciting the Quran with com-
prehension of its meanings and practice of its teachings. This is my ad-
vice to you. If you hold to it, you will conquer Rome and own the world,
if Allah wills.”!?

In June 2014, a video circulated of a masked Islamic State com-
mander telling a cheering crowd: “By Allah, we embarked on our Jihad
only to support the religion of Allah.... Allah willing, we will establish
a state ruled by the Quran and the Sunna.... All of you honorable Mus-
lims are the soldiers of the Muslim State.” He promised that the Islamic
State would establish “the Sharia of Allah, the Quran, and the Sunna” as
the crowed repeatedly responded with cries of “Al/ahu akbar.”

CuAPTER TEN 365

The Islamic State is Not Islamic

U.S. and Western European leaders immediately denied that the Is-
lamic State had anything to do with Islam. “ISIL does not operate in
the name of any religion,” said Deputy State Department spokesperson
Marie Harf in August 2014. “The president has been very clear about
that, and the more we can underscore that, the better.”!** CIA director
John Brennan said in March 2015: “They are terrorists, they're criminals.
Most—many—of them are psychopathic thugs, murderers who use a
religious concept and masquerade and mask themselves in that religious
construct. Let's make it very clear that the people who carry out acts of
whether it be al-Qaeda or the Islamic State of Iraq and the
Levant—are doing it because they believe it is consistent with what their
view of Islam is. It is totally inconsistent with what the overwhelming
majority of Muslims throughout the world [believe].”"* In September
2014, French foreign minister Laurent Fabius announced: “This is a ter-

terrorism

rorist group and not a state. I do not recommend using the term Islamic
State because it blurs the lines between Islam, Muslims and Islamists.”!

The Isiamic State professed contempt and amusement over all this
confusion and denial. In his September 21, 2014, address calling for ji-
had strikes in the U.S. and Europe, Islamic State spokesman Abu Mu-
hammad Adnani ridiculed John Kerry (“that uncircumcised old geezer”)
and Barack Obama for declaring that the Islamic State was not Islamic,
as if they were Islamic authorities.1”

And indeed, everything the Islamic State did was clearly based on
Islamic texts and teachings. Its public beheadings applied the Qur’an’s
directive: “When you meet the unbelievers, strike the necks.” (47:4)

Similar calculations hold true regarding the Islamic State's prac-
tice of kidnapping Yazidi and Christian women and pressing them !nto
sex slavery. The Qur’an says straightforwardly that in addition to wives
(“two or three or four”), Muslim men may enjoy the “captives of the
right hand” (4:3, 4:24). These are specified as being women who have
been seized as the spoils of war (33:50) and are to be used specifically for
sexual purposes, as men are to “guard their private parts except from their
wives or those their right hands possess.” (23:5-6).

If these women are already married, no problem. Islamic law di-

rects that “when a child or a woman is taken captive, they become

366 Tue History or Jinap: From MunamMaAp TO ISIS

slaves by the fact of capture, and the woman's previous marriage 1s
immediately annulled.”"**

In May 2011, a female Kuwaiti activist and politician, Salwa
al-Mutairi, noted that Harun al-Rashid, the renowned Abbasid caliph
from 786 to 809, “had 2,000 sex slaves.”"*”

On December 15, 2014, the Islamic State released a document enti-
tled “Clarification [regarding] the Hudud”—that is, punishments Allah
specifies in the Qur’an. This was essentially the Islamic State’s penal
code, and every aspect of it was drawn from Islamic teaching’? Blas-
phemy against Islam was punishable by death, also as per the Qur'an: “If
they violate their oaths after pledging to keep their covenants, and attack
your religion, you may fight the leaders of paganism—you are no longer
bound by your covenant with them—that they may refrain.” (Qur'an
9:12) Adulterers were to be stoned to death; fornicators would be give
one hundred lashes and exile. Stoning was in the Aadith—a hadith in
which the caliph Umar said it had once been in the Qur’an:

Umar said, “I am afraid that after a long time has passed,
people may say, ‘We do not find the Verses of the Rajam
[stoning to death] in the Holy Book,’ and consequent-
ly they may go astray by leaving an obligation that Allah
has revealed. Lo! I confirm that the penalty of Rajam be
inflicted on him who commits illegal sexual intercourse, if
he is already married and the crime is proved by witnesses
or pregnancy or confession.” Sufyan added, “I have memo-
rized this narration in this way.” Umar added, “Surely Al-
lah’s Apostle carried out the penalty of Rajam, and so did
we after him.”"*!

Sodomy (homosexuality) was also to be punished by death, as per Mu-
hammad's reported words: “If you find anyone doing as Lot’s people did,
kill the one who does it, and the one to whom it is done.”!52

The Islamic State’s rapid success was partly attributable to its fidelity
to Islam and partly also to its financial backing, which came, predict-
ably enough, in great part from Saudi Arabia. In August 2014, Hillary

CHAPTER TEN 367

Clinton wrote to John Podesta, an adviser to President Barack Obama:
“We need to use our diplomatic and more traditional intelligence assets
to bring pressure on the governments of Qatar and Saudi Arabia, which
are providing clandestine financial and logistic support to ISIL [Isis] and
other radical Sunni groups in the region. This effort will be enhanced by
the stepped-up commitment in the [Kurdish Regional Government].
The Qataris and Saudis will be put in a position of balancing policy be-
tween their ongoing competition to dominate the Sunni world and the
consequences of serious US pressure.”!

But nothing was done.

At its height, the Islamic State controlled a territory larger than
Great Britain and attracted thirty thousand foreign fighters from a hun-
dred countries to travel to Iraq and Syria to join the caliphate. It gained
the allegiance of other jihad groups in Libya, Nigeria, the Philippines,
and elsewhere. Muslims took its apparent success as a sign of Allah's
favor: the caliphate had indeed returned.

It didn't last long, however. When Donald Trump replaced Barack
Obama as president of the United States, Iraqi forces and others began
rolling up Islamic State strongholds, such that within a year of the
beginning of the Trump presidency, the Islamic State had lost nine-
ty-eight percent of its territory. The jihad threat posed by the Islamic
State did not lessen, however, as those foreign fighters who survived
returned to their home countries, often welcomed back by Western
leaders who were convinced that kind treatment would compel them
to turn away from jihad.

The Jihad Continues

In any case, the Islamic State was gone from Iraq and Syria, but the
dream of the caliphate and the obligation to jihad remained, and
other Muslims were quite willing, even eager, to take up arms in
service of both.

The early twenty-first century saw a sharp rise in jihad massacres
perpetrated all over the West by individuals or small groups of Mus-
lims: in London, Manchester, Paris, Toulouse, Nice, Amsterdam, Ma-

368 Tur History of Jinap: From MvHAMMAD TO ISIS

drid, Brussels, Berlin, Munich, Copenhagen, Malmé, Stockholm, Turku
(in Finland), Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Beslan, among other places.
Filmmaker Theo van Gogh was massacred on an Amsterdam street in
2004 for offending Islam; as mentioned previously, the cartoonists of the
satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo were murdered in Paris in January 2015
for the same offense. In July 2016, Islamic jihadists murdered a French
priest, Father Jacques Hamel, at the altar of his church for the crime of
being Christian.

After each one of these atrocities, the local and national authorities
called for prayer vigils and vowed their resolve against the “terrorists” of
unspecified ideology, but they did nothing to address the immigration
and appeasement policies that had led to these attacks in the first place.

As crime rates skyrocketed and jihad terror attacks became an in-
creasingly common feature of the landscape in Europe, authorities all
over the West seemed more concerned with making sure their people
did not think negatively about Islam than defending them against the
jihad onslaught.

The Jihad Against Myanmar

One notable example of this came in 2017 when the international media
focused in horror upon the South Asian country of Myanmar (formerly
Burma), which was, according to press reports, destroying the homes,
exiling, and often massacring the nation’s Muslim community, known as
the Rohingyas.

According to news reports, this was entirely the fault of Buddhist
leaders in Myanmar who were stirring up hatred against the Muslims.
This was the media’s consistent line. In 2013, TIME magazine's cover
featured a Buddhist monk glowering over the caption: “The Face of Bud-
dhist Terror: How Militant Monks Are Fueling Anti-Muslim Violence
in Asia.”!* When the violence intensified in 2017, the UK’s Guardian
newspaper claimed that the Buddhists of Myanmar had been stirred up
against the Rohingyas by a fanatical monk named Ashin Parathu who
was, it charged, “stoking religious hatred across Burma. His paranoia
and fear, muddled with racist stereotypes and unfounded rumors, have
helped to incite violence and spread disinformation.”'

CHAPTER JEN 369

The government of Myanmar denied committing any atrocities
against the Rohingyas, asserting that many widely reported incidents
had been fabricated, but the media generally brushed aside these de-
nials."** Few news outlets reported that the conflict had intensified in
the summer and fall of 2017 because of an August 2017 jihad attack on
Myanmar police and border posts.** And hardly any news reports in-
formed the public about the roots of the conflict: the Rohingya Muslims
had actually been waging jihad against the Buddhists of Myanmar for
nearly two centuries.

As is so often the case, the British were behind this. After they an-
nexed Arakan, the area of western Burma now known as Rakhine state,
in 1826, they began encouraging Muslims to move to the area to serve
as a source of cheap farm labor.-** The Muslim population grew rapidly,
as did tensions with the Buddhists. In 1942, the British armed the Ro-
hingyas to fight the Japanese, but the Rohingyas instead turned their
weapons on the Buddhists, destroying whole villages, as well as Buddhist
monasteries.”*” When the British withdrew that same vear in the face of
the Japanese advance, the Rohingvas set upon the Buddhists of Arakan
in force, killing at least 20,000.°” In 1946, as the partition of India was
beginning, Rohingya leaders asked Muslim leader Mohammed Ali Jin-
nah to make Rakhine state part of East Pakistan (now Bangladesh).**!
Jinnah refused, whereupon Rohingya jihadis began a series of attacks
against the Burmese government with the aim of joining East Pakistan
or forming an independent Islamic state of their own.’*

Those attacks have continued up to the present. Bur for the media,
the crisis in Myanmar was simply a matter of “anti-Muslim bigotry,” as
was resistance to the Muslim migrant influx in Europe.

The End?

The failure of today’s leadership and the international media to in-
form the public about what was really going on was an abdication of
responsibility unparalleled in history, and one that rebuked the leaders
throughout history who died to defend their people from the advanc-
ing jihad. On May 28, 1453, the day before the warriors of jihad finally
broke through the defenses of Constantinople and realized their seven-

370 THe History oF JinaD: From MunammMap To ISIS

hundred-year-old dream of conquering the great city, the last Byzantine
emperor, Constantine XI Paleologus, said to his officers:

You know well that the hour has come: the enemy of our
faith wishes to oppress us even more closely by sea and land
with all his engines and skill to attack us with the entire
strength of this siege force, as a snake about to spew its
venom; he is in a hurry to devour us, like a savage lion.
For this reason I am imploring you to fight like men with
brave souls, as you have done from the beginning up to this
day, against the enemy of our faith. I hand over to you my
glorious, famous, respected, noble city, the shining Queen
of cities, our homeland. You know well, my brothers, that
we have four obligations in common, which force us to pre-
fer death over survival: first our faith and piety; second our
homeland; third, the emperor anointed by the Lord and
fourth; our relatives and friends.

Well, my brothers, if we must fight for one of these ob-
ligations, we will be even more liable under the command
strength of all four; as you can clearly understand. If God
grants victory to the impious because of my own sins, we
will endanger our lives for our holy faith, which Christ gave
us with his own blood. This is most important of all. Even
if one gains the entire world but loses his soul in the pro-
cess, what will it benefit! Second, we will be deprived of
such famous homeland and of our liberty. Third, our em-
pire, renowned in the past but presently humbled, low and
exhausted, will be ruled by a tyrant and an impious man.
Fourth, we will be separated from our dearest children,
wives and relatives...

Now he wants to enslave her and throw the yoke upon
the Mistress of Cities, our holy churches, where the Holy
‘Trinity was worshipped, where the Holy Ghost was glori-
fied in hymns, where angels were heard praising in chant
the deity of and the incarnation of God’s word, he wants to

CHAPTER TEN 371

turn into shrines of his blasphemy, shrines of the mad and
false Prophet, Mohammed, as well as into stables for his
horses and camels.

Consider then, my brother and comrades in arms, how
the commemoration of our death, our memory, fame and
freedom can be rendered eternal.!®

In the twenty-first century, the leaders of Europe, as well as many
in North America, have brought almost certain doom on their countries
no less unmistakable than that which befell Constantinople on May 29,
1453. Instead of taking responsibility for what they have done, they have
doggedly stayed their course. They would have denounced the doomed
Emperor Constantine XI, like his tragic predecessor Manuel II, as “Is-
lamophobic,” and his exhortation to defend Constantinople to the death
as “militaristic” and “xenophobic.”

Muhammad is supposed to have said it so long ago: “I have been
made victorious through terror.”'** In the early twenty-first century, he
is being proven correct. As the fourteen-hundred-year Islamic jihad
against the free world continues to advance, the best allies the warriors
of jihad have are the very people they have in their sights.

PDF created by Rajesh Arya - Gujarat

ENDNOTES

Introduction

1

Imam Muslim, Sahih Muslim, rev. ed., translated by Abdul Hamid Siddiqi, bk. 19, no.
4294 (Kitab Bhavan, 2000).

a Ahmed ibn Nagqib al-Misri, Reliance of the Traveller (‘Umdat al-Salik): A Classic Manu-
al of Islamic Sacred Law, translated by Nuh Ha Mim Keller (Amana Publications, 1999),
section 09.0.

3. Reliance of the Traveller, 09.8.

4 Al-Hidavah, vol. li. P. 140, in Thomas P. Hughes, “Jihad,” in 4 Dictionary of Islam, (W.H.
Allen, 1895), pp. 243-248.

5 Al-Hidayah, vol. li. P. 140, in Thomas P. Hughes, “Jihad,” in A Dictionary of Islam, (W.H.
Allen, 1895), pp. 243-248.

6 — Ibn Khaldun, 7he Mugaddimah: An Introduction to History, translated by Franz Rosen-
thal; edited and abridged by N. J. Dawood, (Princeton University Press, 1967), 183.

7 Ibn Taymiyya, “Jihad,” in Rudolph Peters, Jihad in Classical and Modern Islam, (Markus
Wiener Publishers, 1996), 49.

Chapter One

1 Muhammed Ibn Ismaiel Al-Bukhari, Sahih al-Bukhari: The Translation of the Mean-
ings, translated by Muhammad M. Khan, vol. 4, bk. 56, no. 2977 (Darussalam, 1997).

2 Ibid., bk. 64, no. 4428.

3 Ibid., bk. 56, no. 2977.

4 For much more on this, see my book Did Muhammad Exist? An Inquiry Into Islam’s
Obscure Origins (ISI Books, 2010).

5 Ibn Ishaq, The Life of Muhammad: A Translation of Ibn Ishaq s Sirat Rasul Allah, trans-
lated by Alfred Guillaume (Oxford University Press, 1955), 131.

6 ~—Ibid., 287-88.

7 = Ibid., 288.

8 Ibn Sa'd, Kitab Al-Tabagat Al-Kabir, translated by S. Moinul Hag and H. K. Ghazanfar,
vol. 2 (Kitab Bhavan, n.d.), 9.

9 = Ishaq, The Life of Muhammad, 294.

\

Tue History oF Jinap: From MunamMap To ISIS

Ibid., 297.
Ibid., 298.

For various estimates on the number of Muslim warriors, see Ibn Sa’d, Kitab Al-Tabagat
Al-Kabir, 20-21.

Ishaq, The Life of Muhammad, 300.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid., 301.

Al-Bukhari, Sahih al-Bukhari, vol. 4, bk. 58, no, 3185.
Ibid., vol. 1, bk. 8, no. 520.

Ishaq, The Life of Muhammad, 308.

Thid., 304.

Al-Bukhari, Sahih al-Bukhari, vol. 4, bk. 57, no. 3141.
Ibid., vol. 4, bk. 58, no. 3185.

Ishaq, The Life of Muhammad, 306.

Sad, Kitab Al-Tabagat Al-Kabir, 40.

“Banu” means “tribe.”

Abu Ja'far Muhammad bin Jarir al-Tabari, The History of al-Tabari, vol. 7, The Foun-
dation of the Community, translated by M. V. McDonald (State University of New York
Press, 1987), 86.

Ishaq, The Life of Muhammad, 363.

Ibid.

Ibid., 367.

Al-Bukhani, Sahih al-Bukhari, vol. 5, bk. 64, no. 4037,
Ibid,

Ibid.; Sa'd, Kitab Al-Tabagat Al-Kabir, 37.

Sad, Kitab Al-Tabagat Al-Kabir, 37.

Ishaq, The Life of Muhammad, 369, Sa'd, Kitab Al-Tabagat Al-Kabir, 36.
Ishaq, The Life of Muhammad, 369.

Al-Bukhari, Sahih al-Bukhari, vol. 5, bk. 64, no. 4065.
Ishaq, The Life of Muhammad, 382.

Ibid., 386.

Al-Tabari, The History of al-Tabari, vol. 7, 158.

Ibid., 159.

Imam Muslim, Sahih Muslim, rev, ed., translated by Abdul Hamid Siddiqi, bk. 19, no.
4326 (Kitab Bhavan, 2000).

Ishaq, The Life of Muhammad, 437,
Sa'd, Kitab Al-Tabagat Al-Kabir, 70.
Ishaq, The Life of Muhammad, 438.
Ibid., 450.

ENDNOTES 375

Ibid., 452.

Al-Tabari, The History of al-Tabari, vol. 8, The Victory of Istam, translated by Michael
Fishbein (State University of New York Press, 1997), 11.

Ishaq, The Life of Muhammad, 452.
Al-Tabari, The History of al-Tabari, vol. 8, 12.
Ishaq, The Life of Muhammad, 452.

Ibid., 454,

Thic., 460.

Muhammed Ibn Ismaicl Al-Bukhari, Sahih al-Bukhari: The Translation of the Mean-
ings, translated by Muhammad M. Khan, vol. 4, bk. 56, no. 2813 (Darussalam, 1997).

Ishaq, The Life of Muhammad, 461.
Al-Bukhani, Sahih al-Bukhari, vol. 4, bk. 56, no. 3043.
Sad, Kitab Al-Tabagat Al-Kabir, vol. 2, 93; cf. Ishaq, The Life of Muhammad, 464.

Abu-Dawud Sulaiman bin Al-Aash’ath Al-Azdi as-Sijistani, Sunan abu-Dawud, trans-
lated by Ahmad Hasan, bk. 38, no. 4390 (Kitab Bhavan, 1990).

Ishaq, The Life of Muhammad, 464.

Sad, Kitab Al-Tabagat Al-Kabir, vol. 2, 93.

Ishaq, The Life of Muhammad, 464.

Al-Bukhari, Sahih al-Bukhari, vol. 4, bk. 57, no. 3128.
Ishaq, The Life of Muhammad, 490.

Al-Bukhari, Sahih al-Bukhari, vol. 9, bk. 97, no. 7409.
Ishaq, The Life of Muhammad, 504.

Tbid., 509.

Yahiya Emerick, The Life and Work of Muhammad (Alpha Books, 2002), 239.
Ibid., 240,

Ishaq, The Life of Muhammad, 511.

Ibid.

Said, Kitab Al Tabaqat Al-Kabir, vol. 2, 132-33.
Ishaq, The Life of Muhammad, 515.

Sad, Kitab Al-Tabagat Al-Kabir, vol. 2, 136.

Ibid., 137.

Al-Bukhari, Sahih al-Bukhari, vol. 4, bk. $7, no. 3152.
Imam Muslim, Sahih Muslim, bk. 10, no. 3761.

Ishaq, The Life of Muhammad, 515.

Sad, Kitab Al-Tabagat Al-Kabir, vol. 2, 137.
Al-Bukhari, Sahih ai-Bukhari, vol. 5, bk. 64, no. 4200.
Sad, Kitab Al-Tabagat Al-Kabir, vol. 2, 142.
Al-Bukhari, Sahih al-Bukhari, vol. 1, bk. 8, no. 371.
Imam Muslim, Sahih Muslim, bk. 8, no. 3329,
Al-Bukhari, Sahih al-Bukhari, vol. 1, bk. 8, no. 371.

Tue History of Jtnap: From MunammMapb TO ISIS

376

83 Ibid.

84 Ishaq, The Life of Muhammad, 545.

85 Thid., 546.

86 = Ibid., 547.

87 = Ibid.

88 Sad, Kitab Al-Tabagat Al-Kabir, vol. 2, 168.

89 As-Sipistani, Suzan abu-Dawud, bk. 38, no. 4346.

90 Ishaq, The Life of Muhammad, 567.

91 Tbid., 569.

92 Guillaume explains: “Ha'it means wall and also the garden which it surrounds.”

93 Ishaq, The Life of Muhammad, 589.

94 Thid., 595-96.

95 Al-Bukhari, Sahih al-Bukhari, vol. 4, bk. 56, no. 2941.

96 Ibid., vol. 5, bk. 64, no. 4424.

97 Ibid., vol. 4, bk. 61, no. 3618.

98 Muslim, Sakih Mustim, bk. 19, no, 4294,

99 Al-Bukhari, Sahih al-Bukhari, vol. 4, bk. 56, no. 2785.

100 Muslim, Sahih Muslim, bk. 10, no. 31; ef Al-Bukhari, Sahih al-Bukhari, vol. 1, bk. 2, no. 25.

101 Ishaq, The Life of Muhammad, 645-46.

102 Ibid., 643.

103 Muslim, Sahih Muslim, bk. 19, no. 4366.

104 Sa'd, Kitab Al-Tabagat Al-Kabir, vol. 1, 328.

105 Ibid., vol. 1, 328~29.

106 Ishaq, The Life of Muhammad, 659-60. “T.” refers to al-Tabari, a ninth-century Muslim
historian whose recension of this material provides additional information.

Chapter Two

1 Muslim, Sahih Muslim, bk. 31, no. 5916.

2 Al-Bukhari, Sahih al-Bukhari, vol. 4, bk. 55, no. 2741,

3. At-Tirmidhi, vol. 1, bk. 46, no. 3673. Sunnah.com. http://sunnah.com/urn/635490

4 Al-Tabani, The History of al-Tabari, vol. 10, The Conquest of Arabia, translated by Fred
M. Donner (State University of New York Press, 1993), 7.

5 Thid., 8.

6 Ibid., 8-9.

7 Ishaq, The Life of Muhammad, 183.

8 AJ)-Bukhari, Sahih al-Bukhari, vol. 5, bk. 62, no. 3667.

9 Al-Tabari, The History of al-Tabari, vol. 10, 11-12.

40) = Akbar Shah Najeebabadi, The History of Islam, vol. 1 (Darussalam, 2000), 276.

11. Fred Donner, Muhammad and the Believers at the Origins of Islam (The Belknap Press

of Harvard University Press, 2010), 100-01.

ENDNOTES 377

Al-Tabari, The History of al-Tabari, vol. 10, 41.
Al-Bukhari, Sahih al-Bukhari, vol. 9, bk. 88, no. 6922; cf. vol. 4, bk. 56, ne. 3017.
Al-Tabari, The History of al-Tabari, vol. 10, 103.
ibid., 100-01.

Tbid., 100..

Thid., 104.

Ibid.

Ibid., 102.

Ibid., 121.

Ibid., 133.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Abubakr Asadulla, /slam vs. West: Fact or Fiction? A brief historical, political, theolog-
ical, philosophical, and psychological perspective (iUniverse, 2009), 42.

Modern-day Basra in Iraq.

Al-Tabari, The History of al-Tabari, vol. 11, The Challenge to the Empires, translated by
Khalid Yahya Blankinship (State University of New York Press, 1993), 1-2.

Ibid., 4.

Ibid., 6.

Ibid., 4.

Ibid., 7.

Ibid,

Ibid., 59-60.

Ibid., 67.

Ibid., 68.

Ibid.

Agha Ibrahim Akram, /slamic Historical General Khalid Bin Waleed (Lulu Press, 2016).
Al-Tabari, The History of al-Tabari, vol. 11, 129.
Ibid., 158.

Al-Tabari places the battle at the end of Abu Bakr’s reign as caliph, during Khalid’s stint
as commander of the Muslim armies; most historians, however, place it several years later.

Al-Tabari, The History of al-Tabari, vol. 11, 94.

Thid., 94.

Ibid., 103.

H. U. Rahman, Chronology of Islamic History, 570-1000 CE (Ta-Ha Publishers, 1999),
59-60, 63-64.

At-Tirmidhi, vol. 3, bk. 19, no. 1606. Sunnah.com, https://sunnah.com/tirmidh/21/69.
Najeebabadi, The History of Islam, vol. 1, 327.

Al-Bukhari, Sahih al-Bukhari, vol. 4, bk. 58, no. 3162.

Al-Tabari, The History of al-Tabari, vol. 11, 173.

378

THE History oF JIHAD: FRomM MuHAMMAD TO ISIS

Ibid., 174.
Najeebabadi, The History of Islam, vol. 1, 334.

Al-Tabari, The History of al-Tabari, vol. 12, The Battle of al-Qadisiyvah and the Conquest
of Syria and Palestine, translated by Yohanan Friedman (State University of New York
Press, 1992), 31.

Ibid., 31.

Ibid., 32.

Tbid., 34.

Ibid., 36.

Ibid., 39.

Ibid.

Ibid., 167.

Najeebabadi, The History of Islam, vol. 1, 367,
Ibid.

Ibid., 376.

Al-Tabari, The History of al-Tabari, vol. 12, 191.

Robert G. Hoyland, Seeing Islam As Others Saw It: A Survey and Evaluation of Chris-
tian, Jewish and Zoroastrian Writings On Early Islam (Darwin Press, 1997), 69.

Thid.72=73.

Steven Runciman, A History of the Crusades, vol. 1 (Cambridge University Press, 1951),
ae

Ibid., 4.

Al-Tabari, The History of al-Tabari, vol. 13, The Conquest of frag, Southwestern Persia,
and Egypt, translated by Gautier H. A. Juynboll (State University of New York Press,
1989), 108.

Thid.
Ibid.

Abu Ja’far Muhammad bin Jarir al-Tabari, The History of al-Tabari, vol. 3, 9, in Kalid Ibn
Al-Walid (Brother Noah Publishing, 2015), 224.

Bat Ye’or, The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam: From Jihad to Dhimmitude
(Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996), 271-72.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Al-Tabari, The History of al-Tabari, vol. 13, 165.

Hoyland, Seetng Islam As Others Saw It, 121.

Ye'or, The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam, 274.
Ibid., 275.

“Khalifa Umar bin al-Khattab—Death of Umar,” Alim, http://www.alim.org/library/bi-
ography/khalifa/content/KUM/19/2

Ignaz Goldziher, Muslim Studies, translated by C, R. Barber and S. M. Stern (George
Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1971), 118.

79
80

100
101

102
103
104
105
106

107
108

109

ENDNOTES 379

Al-Bukhari, Sahih al-Bukhari, vol. 5, bk. 62, no. 3699.

Theophanes the Confessor, The Chronicle of Theophanes: Anni Mundi 6095-6305 (A.D.
602-813), translated by Harry Turtledove (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982), 44.

Yehuda D. Nevo and Judith Koren, Crossroads to islam (Prometheus Books, 2003), 229.
Al-Bukhari, Sahih al-Bukhari, vol. 6, bk. 65, no. 4784.
Rahman, Chronology of Islamic History, 570-1000 CE, 77-79.

Al-Tabari, The History of al-Tabari, vol. 15, The Crisis of the Early Catiphate, translated
by R. Stephen Humphreys (State University of New York Press, 1990), 185.

Al-Tabari, The History of al-Tabari, vol. 16, The Community Divided, translated by Adri-
an Brockett (State University of New York Press, 1997), 39.

Ibid., 52-166 passim.

Al-Tabari, The History of al-Tabari, vol. 17, The First Civil War, translated by G. R.
Hawting (State University of New York Press, 1996), 29.

Ibid., 34.
Ibid., 79.
Ibid.
Tbid., 101.
Ibid.

Al-Tabari, The History of al-Tabari, vol. 18, Between Civil Wars: The Caliphate of Mu'aw-
iyah, translated by Michael G. Morony (State University of New York Press, 1987), 3-4.

Al-Tabari, The History of al-Tabari, vo). 2, 112, in Muslim Studies by Goldziher, 44.
Goldziher, Muslim Studies, 105.

Allamah Sayyid Muhammad Husayn Tabatabai, Shi’ite Islam, 2nd ed., translated by
Seyyed Hossein Nasr (State University of New York Press, 1977), 195.

Maxime Rodinson, Muhammad, translated by Anne Carter (Pantheon Books, 1971), 190.
Al-Bukhari, Sahih al-Bukhari, vol. 4, bk. 56, no. 2924.

Wilferd Madelung, “Hasan B., Ali B. Abi Taleb,” Encyclopedia Iranica, December 15,
2003, http://www. irantcaonlinc.org/articles/hasan-b-ali.

Rahman, Chronology of Islamic History, 570-1000 CE, 99-101.

Al-Tabari, The History of al-Tabari, vol. 19, The Caliphate of Yazid b. Mu ‘awiyah, trans-
lated by I. K. A. Howard (State University of New York Press, 1990), 129.

Ibid., 131-32.
Ibid., 136-37.
Ibid.
Ibid.

Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1782), vol. 5,
ch. 51, part 8, 256.

ibid.

H. Z. (J. W.) Hirschberg, “The Problem of the Judaized Berbers,” Journal of African
History 4, no. 3 (1963): 317-18.

L. W. Barnard, The Graeco-Roman and Oriental Background of the Iconoclastic Contro-
versy (E. J. Brill, 1974), 18.

380 Tie History or Jistiap: From Munammap to ISIS

Chapter Three

1 Ibn Abd al-Hakam, Dhikr Fath Al-Andalus (History of the Conquest of Spain), translated
by John Harris Jones (Williams & Norgate, 1858), 18.

2 ~~ Ibid.

3. Thid.

4 Ibid., 19.

5 Ibid.

6 Ibid., 19-20.

7 “Al Maggari: Tarik’s Address to His Soldiers, 711 CE, from The Breath of Perfumes,”
Internet Medieval Source Books, https://sourcebooks. fordham.edu/source/7 t1 Tarik I.asp.

8 Ibid.

9 Thid.

10 Al-Hakam, Dhikr Fath Al-Andalus, 22.

11. Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. 5, ch. 51, part 8,
267.

12 Ibid.

13. Warren H. Carroll, The Building of Christendom (Christendom College Press, 1987),
269.

14. Chronicle of Alfonso Ill, 9, in The Building of Christendom by Carroll, 263.

15 Ibid.

16 Bat Ye’or, The Dhimmi: Jews and Christians Under Islam, translated by David Maisel,
Paul Fenton, and David Littman (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1985), 182.

17 Ibid., 182-83.

18 Jan Hogendorn, “The Hideous Trade: Economic Aspects of the ‘Manufacture’ and Sale
of Eunuchs,” Paideuma 45 (1999); 139,

19° Derryl N. MacLean, Religion and Society in Arab Sind (Brill, 1989), 37.

20 = Ibid., 37.

21 K.S. Lal, The Legacy of Muslim Rule in India (Aditya Prakashan, 1992), 118.

22. Arun Shourie, Harsh Narain, Jay Dubashi, Ram Swarup, and Sita Ram Goel, Hindu Temples:
What Happened to Them, vol. 1, A Preliminary Survey (Voice of India, 1990), 264.

23. MacLean, Religion and Society in Arab Sind, 38.

24 Shourie et al., Hindu Temples, 264.

25 MacLean, Religion and Society in Arab Sind, 39.

26 B.R. Ambedkar, Thoughts on Pakistan (Thacker and Company Ltd., 1941), 50.

27 =‘ Shourie et al., Hindu Temples, 205-06.

28 = Ibid., 206.

29 = Ihid., 212.

30 Ibid., 207.

31. Abu Abdur Rahman Ahmad bin Shu’aib bin ‘Ali an-Nasa’i, Sunan an-Nasa’i, translated
by Nasiruddin al-Khattab, bk. 25, ch. 41, no. 3175 (Darussalam, 2007).

32 = Ibid., no. 3177.

ENDNOTES 3831

Al-Tabari, The History of al-Tabari, vol. 24, The Empire in Transition, translated by David
Stephan Powers (State University of New York Press, 1989), 40.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid., 40-41.

Ibid., 41,

H. A. R. Gibb, The Arab Conquests in Central Asia (AMS Press, 1970), 65-66.

G. R. Hawting, The First Dynasty of Islam: The Umavyad Caliphate AD 661-750 (Rout-
ledge, 1986), 86.

Thid., 80.

Al-Tabari, The History of al-Tabari, vol. 25, The End of Expansion, translated by Khalid
Yahya Blankinship (State University of New York Press, 1989), 127-28.

Thid., 128.

Ibid.

Ibid., 126.

Tabatabai, Shi'ite Islam, 202-03.

Al-Tabari, The History of al-Tabari, vol. 26, The Waning of the Umayyad Caliphate,
translated by Carole Hillenbrand (State University of New York Press, 1989), 24.

Ibid., 24-25.
Carroll, The Buiiding of Christendom, 274.

Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. 5, ch. 52, part 2,
301,

Hitler s Table Talk 1941-1944, translated by Norman Cameron and R, H. Stevens (Enig-
ma Books, 2000), 667,

Al-Tabani, The History of al-Tabari, vol. 27, The Abbasid Revolution, translated by John
Alden Williams (State University of New York Press, 1985), 174,

Najeebabadi, The History of slam, vol. 3, 68.

Michael the Syrian, 7he Chronicle of Michael the Great, Patriarch of the Syrians, trans-
lated by Robert Bedrosian (Sources of the Armenian Tradition, 2013), 144.

Ibid., 145.
Theophanes, The Chronicle of Theophanes, 142.
Najeebabadi, The History of Islam, vol. 2, 333.

Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. 5, ch. 52, part 3,
322-23.

Ibid,, 323.
Ibid.

Antoine Fattal, Le statut légal des non-Musulmans en pays d'Islam (Université Saint-Jo-
seph Institut de lettres orientales, 1958), 188.

Michael the Syrian, Te Chronicle of Michael the Great, 145.
Theophanes, The Chronicle of Theophanes, 163.
Ibid.

382 Tur History oF Jinan: From MunAMMAD TO ISIS

64 Ibid.

65 Bat Ye’or, The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam, 302.

66 Karen Armstrong, /slam: A Short History (Modern Library, 2002), 55.

67 Najeebabadi, The History of Islam, vol. 3, 82.

68 Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. 5, ch. 52, part 4, 325.

69 Ibid., 325-26.

70 = Ibid., 326.

71 = Ibid., 327.

72 ~~ Al-Tabari, The History of al-Tabari, vol. 32, The Reunification of the Abbasid Caliphate,
translated by C. E. Bosworth (State University of New York Press, 1987), 196-97. Brack-
eted material added by the English translator.

73. Michael the Syrian, The Chronicle of Michael the Great, 151.

74 ~~ Ibid.

75 Al-Tabari, The History of al-Tabari, vol, 32, 224.

76 Michael the Syrian, The Chronicle of Michael the Great, 153.

77 ~~ ‘Tbid., 154.

78 Ahmed ibn Nagib al-Misri, Reftance of the Traveller (‘Umdat al-Satik): A Classic Manual
of Islamic Sacred Law, translated by Nuh Ha Mim Keller (Amana Publications, 1999),
section 04.9,

79 Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. 5, ch. 56, part 1,
468.

80 Bat Ye'or, The Dhimmi, 186.

81 Bernard Lewis, The Jews of Islam (Princeton University Press, 1984), 47-48.

82 = Ibid., 48-49.

83 Paul Markham, “The Battle of Manzikert: Military Disaster or Political Failure?” De Re
Militari: The Society for Medieval Mititary History, August 1, 2005, http://deremilitari.
org/201 3/09/the-battle-of-manzikert-military-disaster-or-political-failure/,

84 Tabatabai, Shi ite Islam, 208-09.

85 Ibid., 209-210.

86 “Qarmatiyyah,” Overview of World Religions, St. Martin’s College, https://web.archive.
org/web/20070428055 | 34/http://philtar.ucsm.ac.uk/encyclopedia/islam/shia/qarma.
html,

87 J.J. Saunders, A History of Medieval Islam (Routledge, 1965), 130-31.

88 = Ibid., 130.

89 Cyril Glassé, The New Encyclopedia of Islam (Rowman & Littlefield, 1989), 91.

Chapter Four

1 Karen Armstrong, “The curse of the infidel: A century ago Muslim intellectuals admired
the west. Why did we lose their goodwill?” The Guardian, June 20, 2002.

2 Maria Rosa Menocal, The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians

Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain (Little, Brown, 2002), 29-30.

Inn SS &

wo @

10
bil
12
is
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23

24
25
26
a7
28
a9
30

31
32
33

34

35
36
37

EXDNOTES 383

Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President on a New Beginning,” Cairo, June 4, 2009.
Richard Fletcher, Moorish Spain (University of California Press, 1992), 172-73.
Fletcher, Moorish Spain, 93.

Menocal, The Ornament of the World, 72-73.

Kenneth Baxter Wolf, Christian Martyrs in Muslim Spain (Cambridge University Press,
1988), 9, 10.

Ibid., 12.

Ibid.

Menocal, The Ornament of the World, 70,

Wolf, Christian Martyrs in Muslim Spain, 12.

Ibid., 34.

Dario Fernandez~Morera, The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise (ISI Books, 2016), 126-27,
Ibid., 128-29,

Ibid., 130-31.

Tbid., 130.

Ibid., 131-32.

Ibid., 132.

Ibid.

Carroll, The Building of Christendom, 412.
Fernandez-Morera, The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise, 129.
Ibid., 130.

Reinhart Dozy, Spanish islam. A History of the Muslims in Spain, translated by Francis
Griffin Stokes (Goodword Books, 2001), 497.

Carroll, The Building of Christendom, 428.

Dozy, Spanish Islam, 498.

Ibid., 504.

Ibid., 520.

Ibid., 523.

Paul Johnson, 4 History of the Jews (Perennial Library, 1987), 178.

Bernard F. Reilly, The Kingdom of Leén-Castilla under King Alfonso VI, 1065-1109, Li-
brary of Iberian Resources Online, chs. 10-12, http://libro.uca.cdu/alfonso6/index.htm.

Fletcher, Moorish Spain, 108.
Ferndndez-Morera, The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise, 182-83,

Richard Gottheil and Meyer Kayserling, “Granada,” Jewish Encyclopedia (1906), ac-
cessed at http://jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/6855-granada.

David Levering Lewis, Gods Crucible: Lslam and the Making of Europe, 570-1215 (W,
W. Norton, 2008), 364.

Carroll, The Building of Christendom, 523.
Tbid., 523.
Al-Misri, Reliance of the Traveller, section 011.9, 11.

384

\
THe History oF JinaAp: From MunammMab To ISIS

Bat Ye’or, The Dhimmi, 187.

Fletcher, Moorish Spain, 172; Joseph Kenny, The Spread of Islam Through North to West
Africa (Dominican Publications, 2000).

Fernandez-Morera, The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise, 158.
Ibid., 159.
Ibid.

Hogendorn, “The Hideous Trade: Economic Aspects of the ‘Manufacture’ and Sale of
Eunuchs,” 139,

Saunders, A History of Medieval Islam, 144.
Ibid., 147.

Ahmad Shayeq Qassem, Afghanistan's Political Stability: A Dream Unrealised
(Ashgate Publishing, 2009), 19.

Saunders, A History of Medieval Islam, 144.
Shourie, et al., Hindu Temples, 211.
Ambedkar, Thoughts on Pakistan, 51.
Shourie et al., Hindu Temples, 212.

Ibid., 212.

Ibid., 233.

Ibid., 234-35.

Ibid., 203-04.

Ibid., 204.

Ibid.

Ibid., 203.

Sita Ram Goel, The Story of Islamic Imperialism in India (Voice of India, 1982), 45-46.
Tbid., 46.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid., 46-47.

Ambedkar, Thoughts on Pakistan, 50.
Shourie et al., Hindu Temples, 210.

Ibid.

Ibid., 211.

M. J. Akbar, The Shade of Swords: Jihad and the Conflict between Islam and Christianity
(Routledge, 2002), JO1.

J. J. Saunders, A History of Medieval Islam, 144.
Shourie et al., Hindu Temples, 219.

Ibid., 229.

Ibid., 211.

Saunders, 4 History of Medieval Islam, 144.

Goel, The Story of Islamic Imperialism in India, 47.

ENDNOTES 385

74 ~~ Bat Ye’or, The Dhimmi, 188.

75 Robert Hoyland, “The Rise of Islam,” in The Oxford History of Byzantium, edited by
Cyril Mango (Oxford University Press, 2002).

76 Aristakes Lastiverts'i, History, translated by Robert Bedrosian (Sources of the Armenian
Tradition, 1985), 55.

77. Markham, “The Battle of Manzikert.”

78 — Lastiverts’i, History, 57.

79 Markham, “The Battle of Manzikert.”

80 Lastiverts’i, History, 121.

81 John Julius Norwich, Byzantium: The Apogee (Alfred A. Knopf, 1992), 341.

82 Ibid., 342-43.

83 Markham, “The Battle of Manzikert.”

84 Norwich, Byzantium, 346.

85 Markham, “The Battle of Manzikert.”

86 Norwich, Byzantium, 354.

87 R. Scott Peoples, Crusade of Kings (Wildside Press LLC, 2007,) 13.

88 Moshe Gil, A History of Palestine 634-1099 (Cambridge University Press, 1992), 412.

89 Halil Inalcik, “Osman Ghazi’s Siege of Nicaea and the Battle of Bapheus,” in The Otto-
man Emirate, 1300-1389: Halcyon Days in Crete I—A Symposium Held in Rethymnon,
11-13 January 1991, edited by Elizabeth Zachariadou (Crete University Press, 1993), 77.

90 Gil, A History of Palestine 634-1099, 473-76. To his credit, Caliph al-Muqtadir did
respond to the 923 persecutions by ordering the church rebuilt.

91 Ibid.

92 Runciman, A History of the Crusades, vol. 1, 30-32.

93 Carole Hillenbrand, The Crusades. Islamic Perspectives (Routledge, 2000), 101.

94 Gil, A History of Palestine 634-1099, 376.

95 Runciman, A History of the Crusades, vol. 1, 35-36; Hillenbrand, The Crusades, 16-17;
Jonathan Riley-Smith, The Crusades: A Short History (Yale University Press, 1987), 44.

96 Runciman, vol. 1, 49.

Chapter Five

1 Pope Urban II, “Speech at Council of Clermont, 1095, According to Fulcher of Chartres,”
quoted in Gesta Dei per Francos by Bongars, 1, 382 f., translated in A Source Book for
Medieval History, edited by Oliver J. Thatcher and Edgar Holmes McNeal (Scribners,
1905), 513-17, bttp://Awww.fordham.edu/halsall/source/urban2-fulcher.html.

2 James Harvey Robinson, ed., Readings in European History, vol. | (Gian and Co., 1904),

312-16. Reprinted at Medieval Sourcebook, http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/ur-
ban2a.html.

Ibid.

Thomas Madden, The New Concise History of the Crusades (Rowman & Littlefield,
2005), 17-18.

Ibid., 18.

386

15

4
THe History or Jinan: From MunammMapnp TO ISIS

{bid., 19.

Amin Maalouf, The Crusades Through Arab Eyes (Schocken Books, 1984), 44.
Tbid., 19.

Ibid.

{bid., 39.

Ibid.

Ibid., 40.

Ibid., 39.

R. G. D. Laffan, ed. and trans., Select Documents of European History 800-1492, vol. 1
(Henry Holt, 1929). See also “The Crusaders Capture Jerusalem, 1099,” EyeWitness to
History, hetp://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/crusades.htm.

Archbishop Daimbert, Duke Godfrey, and Count Raymond, “Letter to Pope Paschal II,
September, 1099,” in Readings In Church History, edited by Colman J. Barry (Christian
Classics, 1985), 328.

Gil, A History of Palestine 634-1099, 827.
Hillenbrand, The Crusades, 64-65.
Maalouf, The Crusades Through Arab Eyes, 50.

“Remarks as Delivered by President William Jefferson Clinton, Georgetown University,
November 7, 2001,” Georgetown University Office of Protocol and Events, www.george-
town.edu.

Maalouf, The Crusades Through Arab Eyes, xvi.

John Esposito, [slam: The Straight Path, 3rd ed. (Oxford University Press, 1998), 58.
Hillenbrand, The Crusades, 70-71.

Robinson, Readings in European History.

Madden, The New Concise History of the Crusades, 19-20.

Maalouf, The Crusades Through Arab Eyes, 263.

Ibid., 136.

Hillenbrand, The Crusades, 111.

Ibid., 112.

Maalouf, The Crusades Through Arab Eyes, 138.

Ibid., 144,

Tbid., 145.

Ibid.

Tbid., 151-52.

Bernard Lewis, The Assassins: A Radical Sect In Islam (Basic Books, 1967), 2-3.
Ibid., 3-4.

Ibid., 4-5.

Marco Polo, The Travels of Marco Polo, translated by Henry Yule, edited and annotated
by Henri Cordier (John Murray, 1920), ch. 23,

Lewis, The Assassins, 12.
Polo, The Travels of Marco Polo, ch. 24.

ENDNOTES 387

Thid.

Michael the Syrian, The Chronicle of Michael the Great, 190.

Maalouf, The Crusades Through Arab Eyes, 179.

Madden, The New Concise History of the Crusades, 74.

Ibid., 76. .

Ibid.

Thid., 78.

Runciman, 4 History of the Crusades, vol, 2, The Kingdom of Jerusalem and the Frankish
East, 1100-1187 (Cambridge University Press, 1951), 487.

Madden, The New Concise History of the Crusades, 80.

Ibid., 81-82.

Ibid., 70.

Pope Innocent III, Quia Maior, April 19-29, 1213, https://genius.com/Pope-inno-

cent-iii-quia-maior-annotated,

Ibid.

Ibid.

Madden, The New Concise History of the Crusades, 181-82.

John Esposito, ed., The Oxford History of Islam (Oxford University Press, 1999), 692.
Runciman, 4 History of the Crusades, vol. 3 (Cambridge University Press, 1951), 398-402.

Kenneth Meyer Setton, The Papacy and the Levant, 1204-1571: The thirteenth and four-
teenth centuries (American Philosophical Society, 1976), 146.

Runciman, A History of the Crusades, vol. 3, 398-402,

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Richard Bonney, Jihad from Qur ‘an to bin Laden (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 159-60,
Madden, The New Concise History of the Crusades, 189.

Bat Ye’or, The Dhimmi, 196-97.

Fletcher, Moorish Spain, 120.

Andrew Bostom, The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism (Prometheus, 2007), 102.
Ibid., 104.

Bat Ye’or, The Dhimmi, 189.

Ibid.

Damian J. Smith, “The Papacy, the Spanish Kingdoms and Las Navas de Tolosa,” Anu-
ario de Historia de la Iglesia 20 (2011): 171.

Ibid., 174.

Ibid., 175.

Ibid., 177.

Fletcher, Moorish Spain, 124.

Lal, The Legacy of Muslim Rute in India, 49-50.

388 Tue Hisrory or Jinap: From MuHamMMaAbd TO ISI§

76 Goel, The Story of Islamic Imperialism in India, 45-48,

77 Thid., 48.

78 ~~ Ibid.

79 Ambedkar, Thoughts on Pakistan, 52.

80 Goel, The Story of Islamic Imperialism in India, 48.

81 = Ibid.

82 Ibid.

83 Ambedkar, Thoughts on Pakistan, 50.

84 Goel, The Story of Islamic Imperialism in India, 48.

85 Ibid., 49.

86 Thid.

87 Ibid.

88 Ambedkar, Thoughts on Pakistan, 57.

89 Lal, The Legacy of Muslim Rule in India, 119.

90 Thid., 50-51.

91 Ibid., 119-20.

92 Ibid., 119.

Chapter Six

1 Lord Kinross, The Ottoman Centuries: The Rise and Fail of the Turkish Empire (Morrow
Quill Publishers, 1977), 23.

2 — Inalcik, “Osman Ghazi's Siege of Nicaea and the Battle of Bapheus,” 77.

3 Caroline Finkel, Osman’ Dream: The History of the Ottoman Empire (Basic Books,
2007), 5.

4 Michael G. Knapp, “The Concept and Practice of Jihad in Islam,” Parameters (Spring
2003): 83.

5 Lewis, The Assassins, 1-2.

6 Kinross, The Ottoman Centuries, 55.

7 — Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. 2, ch. 66, part 1,
https:/Avww.cccl.org/g/gibbon/decline/volume2/chap66.htm.

8 = Ibid.

9 Kinross, The Ottoman Centuries, 38.

10 Ibid.

11. Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. 2, ch. 64, part 48,
hetps://www,ccel.org/g/gibbon/decline/volume2/chap64.htm.

12. Thid.

13 Ibid.

14 Kinross, The Ottoman Centuries, 55.

15 Ibid.

16 Ibid.

17
18

19
20
21

22
23
24
25

26
27
28

29
30
31

32
ci
34
35

36
37

38
39
40
41

42
43

44
45

46

ENDNOTES 389

Ibid., 42-43,

Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. 2, ch. 64, part 48,
https://vaww.ccel.org/g/gibbon/decline/volume2/chap64.htm.

Ibid.
Godfrey Goodwin, The Janissaries (Sagi Books, 1997), 36-37.

Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. 2, ch. 64, part 53,
https://www.ccel.org/g/gibbon/decline/volume2/chap64.htm.

Bat Ye'or, The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam, 115.
Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures: An International History (Basic Books, 1998), 192.
Kinross, The Ottoman Centuries, 46.

Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. 2, ch. 64, part 54,
hetps://www.ccel.org/g/gibbon/decline/volume2/chap64,htm.

Ibid.
Ibid.

Leslie Peirce, The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottuman Empire (Ox-
ford University Press, 1993), 158; Wilhelm Baum, “Manuel II Palaiologos (1391-1425
A.D.),” De Imperatoribus Romanis, http://www.roman-emperors.org/manuel2.htm.

Baum, “Manuel I Palaiologos (1391-1425 A.D.).”
Ibid.

Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. 2, ch. 64, part 66,
https://www.ccel.org/g/gibbon/decline/volume2/chap64.htm.

Kinross, The Ottoman Centuries, 65.
Finkel, Osman’s Dream, 23.
Baum, “Manuel II Palaiologos (1391-1425 A.D.).”

Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall af the Roman Empire, vol. 2, ch. 64, part 60,
https://www.ccel.org/g/gibbon/decline/volume2/chap64.htm,

Baum, “Manuel II Palaiologos (1391-1425 A.D.).”

Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. 2, ch. 65, part 29,
https://www.ccel.org/g/gibbon/decline/volume2/chap65.htm.

Ibid.
Ibid.
Baum, “Manuel IJ Palaiologos (1391-1425 A.D.).”

Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. 2, ch. 65, part 46,
https://www.ccel.org/g/gibbon/decline/volume2/chap65.htm,

John Julius Norwich, A Short History of Byzantium (Vintage Books, 1999), 362.

Justin Marozzi, Tamerlane: Sword of Islam, Conqueror of the World (Da Capo Press,
2004), 358.

Ibid., 344.

Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. 2, ch. 66, past 32,
https://www.ccel.org/g/gibbon/decline/volume2/chap66.htm.

Pope Benedict XVI, “Faith, reason and the university: memorics and reflections,” address
at University of Regensburg, September 12, 2006.

390

47
48

49
50
51
52

53

54
55
56
57

58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71

72
73

/

75

76
77
78
79
80

Tue History oF Jinap: From MvunamMapb to ISIS

Ibid.

Khaled Abu Toameh, “Gazans warn pope to accept Islam,” Jerusalem Post, September
18, 2006.

Kinross, The Ottoman Centuries: The Rise and Fall of the Turkish Empire, 115.
Ibid., 91.
Steven Runciman, The Fall of Constantinople 1453 (Cambridge University Press, 1965), 145.

Andrew Wheatcroft, Jnfidels: A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam
(Random House, 2005), 195.

“Leading Sunni Sheikh Yousef Al-Qaradhawi and Other Sheikhs Herald the Coming Con-
quest of Rome," MEMRI, December 6, 2002, https://www.memri.org/reports/leading-
sunni-sheikh-yousef-al-qaradhawi-and-other-sheikhs-herald-coming-conquest-rome,

Runciman, The Fail of Constantinople 1453, 149.
Kinross, The Ottoman Centuries, 115-16.
Ibid., 129,

Warren Carroll: The Glory of Christendom: A History of Christendom, vol. 3 (Christen-
dom Press, 1993), p. 571.

Kinross, The Ottoman Centuries, 130-31,
Ibid., 131.

Ibid., 133.

Ibid., 139.

Bat Ye’or, The Dhimmi, 192,
Ibid., 193.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid., 198-99.

Ibid., 201; John Hunwick, Jews of a Saharan Oasis: The Elimination of the Tamantit
Community (n.d., Markus Wiener Publishers).

Goel, The Story af Islamic Imperialism in India, SO.
Lal, The Legacy of Muslim Rule in India, 130.
Ibid.

Vincent Arthur Smith, The Oxford History of India: From the Earliest Times to the End
of 1911 (Clarendon Press, 1920), 245,

Ibid., 241-42.

Lal, The Legacy of Muslim Rule in India, 131.

Goel, The Story of Islamic Imperialism in India, 50~51.
Ibid., 51.

Ibid.

81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100

101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118

ENDNOTES 391

Ibid.

Smith, The Oxford History of India, 248-49.

Ibid., 250.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid., 251.

Ibid., 250.

Ibid.

Thid.

Ibid.

Tbid., 250-51,

Goel, The Story of Islamic Imperialism in India, 55.
Shourie et al., Hindu Temples, 239.

Ibid.

Goel, The Story of Islamic Imperialism in India, 55-56.
Shoune et al., Hindu Temples, 240.

Goel, The Story of islamic Imperialism in India, 55-56; Shourie et al., Hindu Temples, 240,
Goel, The Story of Islamic Imperialism in India, 55-56,
Shourie et al., Hindu Temples, 240.

Ahmad Shayeq Qassem, Afghanistan's Political Stability: A Dream Unrealised
(Ashgate Publishing, 2009), 20.

Marozzi, Tamerlane, 394.

Goel, The Story of lslamic Imperialism in India, 51.
Thid.

Ibid.

Ibid.,,51=52;

Ibid., 52.

Ibid,

Ibid.

Thid.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid., 52-53.

Ibid., 53.

Marozzi, Tamerlane, 355.

Ibid., 360-61.

Ibid.

Ibid., 361-62.

392

119
120
121
122
sVX)
124
15
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137

Tue History oF Jrtav: From MunamMapb TO ISIS

Ibid., 396.

Ibid., 396-97.

Ibid., 399.

Tbid., 400.

Goel, The Story of Islamic Imperialism in India, 56.
Shourie, et al., Hindu Temples, 240.

Ibid., 238.

Ibid., 238-39.

Ibid., 239.

Goel, The Story of Islamic Imperialism in India, 56.
Ibid.

Ibid.

Smith, The Oxford History of India, 280.

Ibid., 281.

Ibid.

Ibid., 253-54.

Shourie et al., Hindu Temples, 269.

Ibid., 240.

Tbid., 232-33.

Chapter Seven

1

2
3
4

al

Finkel, Osman's Dream, 104.
Tbid., 105.
Esposito, The Oxford History of Islam, 692.

Martin Luther, “On war against the Turk,” 1528, http://www.lutherdansk.dk/On%20
war%20against/o20Islamic%20reign%200f%20terror/On%20war%20against%20Islam-
ic%20reign%200f%20terror!.htm

Martin Luther, Works, Weimar ed., 28, 365/; 30 II, 195; 47, 175, in Luther on Islam and the
Papacy by Francis Nigel Lee (Queensland Presbyterian Theological College, 2000), 4.

Kinross, The Ottoman Centuries, 147.
Ibid.

Thid., 176, 179.

Finkel, Osenan's Dream, 119.
Kinross, The Ottoman Centuries, 185.
Ibid.

Ibid., 187.

Thid.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid.

17
18
19
20
21
22

23
24
25
26
27

28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53

ENDNOTES 393

Ibid.

Thid., 188.

Finkel, Osman’ Dream, 124.
Kinross, The Ottoman Centuries, 192,
Finkel, Osman'’s Dream, 129.

Ronald Segal, {slams Black Slaves: The Other Black Diaspora (Farrar, Straus and Gir-
oux, 2001), 114.

Finkel, Osman 's Dream, 150.
Tbid., 151.

Ibid.

Ibid., 152.

Gabor Agoston, “Muslim Cultural Enclaves in Hungary Under Ottoman Rule,” Acta
Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 45, no. 2/3 (1991): 197.

Ibid., 156.

Ibid., 157.

Ibid., 156.

Kinross, The Ottoman Centuries, 264.
Finkel, Osman Dream, 159.

Ibid.

Wheatcroft, Infidels, 27.

Ibid.

Kinross, 7he Ottoman Centuries, 270.
Ibid., 270-71.

Ibid., 271,

Wheatcroft, /nfidels, 31.

Ibid.

Kinross, The Ottoman Centuries, 273.
Ibid., 275.

Ibid., 276.

Finkel, Osman 's Dream, 192.
Kinross, The Ottoman Centuries, 288-89.
Thid., 319.

Thid., 292.

Finkel, Osman’ Dream, 213,
Kinross, The Ottoman Centuries, 315.
Ibid., 315-16.

Finkel, Osman ’s Dream, 279-80.
Kinross, The Ottoman Centuries, 339,
Tbid., 343.

394

54
2
56
57

58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66

67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
$1
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90

Tur History oF Jinan: From MuHAMMAD TO ISIS

Ibid,
Ibid., 346.
Ibid., 347.

Giles Milton, White Gold: The Extraordinary Story of Thomas Pellow and Islam s One
Million White Slaves (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), 12.

Murray Gordon, Slavery in the Arab World (New Amsterdam Books, 1989), 33.
Milton, White Gold, 12.

Ibid., 13.

Ibid., 22.

Ibid., 23.

Thid., 28.

Ibid., 30.

Al-Misri, Reliance of the Traveller, section 09.14.

Abu'l Hasan al-Mawardi, 4/-Abkam as-Sultaniyyah (The Laws of Islamic Governance) (Ta-
Ha Publishers, 1996), 192.

Shourie et al., Hindu Temples, 268.

Ibid., 237.

Ibid., 244,

Tbid., 269.

Ibid., 233.

Ibid., 269.

Ibid.

Ibid., 229.

Ibid.

Goel, The Story of Islamic Imperialism in India, 57.
Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid., 57-58.

Hermann Kulke and Dietmar Rothermund, A History of India (Routledge, 2016), 344.
Smith, The Oxford History of India, 29S.

Ibid., 310.

Ibid., 306.

Ibid., 307.

Goel, The Story of Islamic imperialism in India, 57-58.
Ibid.

Kulke and Rothermund, 4 History of India, 361; Smith, The Oxford History of India, 350.
Smith, The Oxford History of India, 357.

Ibid., 358.

Kulke and Rothermund, A History of India, 368.

ENDNOTES 395

91 Smith, The Oxford History of India, 359-60.
92 Ibid., 360.
93 Shourie et al., Hindu Temples, 242.

94 Memoirs of the Emperor Jahangueir, written by himself: and translated from a Persian
manuscript, by Major David Price (Oriental Translation Committee, 1829), 33.

95 Ibid.
96 Goel, The Storv of Islamic Imperialism in India, 59; Smith, The Oxford History of India, 376.
97 Goel, The Story of Islamic Imperialism in India, 59.

98 Ibid.
99 Shourie et al., Hindu Temples, 272.
100 Ibid.

101 Ibid., 246.

102 Ibid., 266.

103 Memoirs of the Emperor Jahangueir, 14-15.
104 Ibid., 15.

105 Lal, 7he Legacy of Muslim Rule in India, 330.
106 Ibid., 271-72.

107 Abdul Hamid Lahori, Badshanama af Abdul Hamid Lahori, translated by Henry Miers
Elliot (Hafiz Press, 1875), 39.

108 Ibid., 46.

109 Ibid., 55.

110 Shourie, et al., Hindu Temples, 278.

111 Smith, The Oxford History of India, 409.

112 Ibid., 411-15.

113 Shourie et al., Hindu Temples, 279; Goel, The Story of Islamic Imperialism in India, 61.
114 Ibid., 280.

115 Ibid., 61.

116 I[bid., 62.

117 Ibid., 280.

118 Ibid., 281; Goel, The Story of Islamic Imperialism in India, 62.
119 Shourie et al., Hindu Temples, 281.

120 Ibid.

121 Ibid.

122 Ibid.

123 Ibid., 284.

124 Ibid., 286.

125 Ibid., 285.

126 Goel, The Story of Istamic Imperialism in India, 63.

127 Shourie et al., Hindu Temples, 285.

396

128
129
130

131
132
133
134

THe History OF JiHAD: From MuwHamMaD TO ISIS

Ibid.
Shourie et al., Hindu Temples, 288; Smith, The Oxford History of India, 438.

Kulke and Rothermund, A History of India, 379; Goel, The Story of Islamic Imperialism
in India, 62.

Smith, The Oxford History of India, 438-39.
Shourie et al., Hindu Temples, 289.

Ibid., 282.

Ibid., 279.

Chapter Light

1

& WwW bh

“Sweden, the Ottoman Empire and the Crimean Tartars, ¢ 1580-1714—The Realpolitik
of a Christian Kingdom,” Véridsinbérdeskriget, February 14, 2011, https://varidsinbor-
deskriget. wordpress.com/2011/02/14/sweden-the-ottoman-empire-and-the-crimean-tar-
tars-c-1580-%E2%80%93-1 7 14-%E2%80%93-the-realpolitik-of-a-christian-kingdom/.

Kinross, Zhe Ottoman Centuries, 372-73.
Thid., 374-76.

Umar Busnavi, History of the War in Bosnia During the Years 1737-1739, translated by
C. Fraser (Oriental Translation Fund, 1830), 2-3.

Ibid., 86.

Hamid Algar, Wahhabism: A Critical Essay (Islamic Publications International, 2002), 13.
Tbid., 13-14.

Bonney, Jihad from Qur'an to bin Laden, 159-60.

Algar, Wahhabism, 18.

Ibid., 18-19.

Ibid., 22-23.

Charles Allen, God's Terrorists: The Wahhabi Cult and the Hidden Roots of Modern
Jihad (Da Capo Press, 2006), 61.

Kinross, The Ottoman Centuries, 395.

Ibid., 405.

Finkel, Osman’s Dream, 383.

Ibid.

Andrew Roberts, Napoleon: A Life (Penguin, 2014), 201.
Ibid.

Ibid., 222.

Ibid., 199.

Ibid., 202.

Ibid., 200.

“Halabi, Suleimanal-,” Damascus Online, https://web.archive.org/web/20091231235534/
http://damascus-online,com/se/dio/halabi_suleiman.htm.

Andrew James McGregor, 4 Military History of Modern Egypt: From the Ottoman Con-
quest io the Ramadan War (Greenwood Publishing Group, 2006), 48.

59

ENDNOTES 397

Roberts, Napoleon, 199.

“Kuwaiti preacher, [SIS call for demolition of Egypt’s Sphinx, pyramids,” RT, March 9,
2015, https://www.rt.com/news/239093-islamist-calls-destroy-pyramids/.

Algar, Wahhabism, 21.

Ibid., 30.

Ibid., 37.

Ibid., 38.

Wheatcroft, Infidels, 233.

Thomas Gordon, History of the Greek Revolution (T. Cadell, 1833), 147.
Ibid., 148.

Ibid., 148-49.

Kinross, The Ottoman Centuries, 444.

Ibid.

Gordon, History of the Greek Revolution, 156.
Ibid.

Nomikos Michael Vaporis, Witnesses for Christ: Orthadox Christians, Neomartyrs of the
Ottoman Period 1437-1860 (St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 2000), 340.

Ibid.; Gordon, History of the Greek Revolution, 187.
Gordon, History of the Greek Revolution, 187.
Kinross, The Ottoman Centuries, 477.

Ibid,

Ibid.

Ibid.

Bat Ye’or, The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam, 399-400.
Tbid., 406.

Ibid., 417.

Finkel, Osman’ Dream, 470-71.

Bonney, Jihad from Qur'an to bin Laden, 149,
Segal, /sfam s Black Slaves, 132.

Ibid., 133.

Ibid., 133-34.

Bernard Lewis, Race and Slavery in the Middle Kast (Oxford University Press, 1994),
http://www. fordham.edu/halsall/med/lewis1.html.

Ibid.
Segal, Islam s Black Slaves, 56.
Bat Ye’or, The Dhimmi, 321.

Tudor Parfitt, “Ohimma Versus Protection in Nineteenth Century Morocco,” in [srael
and Ishmael; Studies in Muslim-Jewish Relations, edited by Tudor Parfitt (Palgrave Mac-
millan, 2000), 157-59,

Vahakn N. Dadrian, The History of the Armenian Genocide (Berghahn Books, 1995), 147.

398

60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74

75
76
77
78
79
80

81
82
83

84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94

Tue History or JistaD: From MuwAmMMAD TO ISIS

Ibid., 117.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid,

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid., 144.

Ibid.

Ibid., 144-45.

Ibid., 146.

Kinross, The Ottoman Centuries, 560.
Dadrian, The History of the Armenian Genocide, 146.
Ibid.

Ibid., 169, note 121.

Andrew G. Bostom, “A Modern Jihad Genocide,” FrontPageMagazine.com, April 28,
2003, http://archive. frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspxPARTID=18489.

Dadrian, The History of the Armenian Genocide, 156.

Ibid., 59.

Frank Lambert, The Barbary Wars (Hill and Wang, 2005), 4.
Ibid.

Ibid., 92-93.

“Treaty of Peace and Friendship between the United States of America and the Bey
and Subjects of Tripoli of Barbary,” Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/law/help/
us-treaties/bevans/b-tripoli-ust000011-1070.pdf.

Ibid.
Ibid.

United States Department of State, The Diplomatic Correspondence of the United States
of America, vol. | (Blair & Rives, 1837), 605.

Shourie et al., Hindu Temples, 287.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid., 287-88.

Smith, The Oxford History of India, 462.
Bonney, Jihad from Qur'an to bin Laden, 101.
Ibid., 102.

Ibid., 103.

Tbid., 104.

Smith, The Oxford History of India, 462.
Ibid., 465.

ENDNOTES 399

95 Rudolph Peters, Islam and Colonialism: The Doctrine of Jihad in Modern History (Mou-
ton Publishers, 1979), 46,

96 Ibid., 47.

97 = Ibid.

98 Ibid., 48-49.

99 ITbid., 50-51.

100 AJl-Misri, Reliance of the Traveller, section 09.2.
101 Peters, Islam and Colonialism, 51.

102 Ibid., 51-52.

103 Muslim ibn al-Hajjaj, Sahih Muslim, rev. ed., translated by Abdul Hamid Siddiqi (Kitab
Bhavan, 2000), no. 4553.

104 Sanjecv Nayyar, “So who was really responsible for Partition?” Rediff News, Septem-
ber 17, 2009, http://news.rediff.com/column/2009/sep/17/so-who-was-really-responsi-
ble-for-partition.htm.

105 Thid.
106 Peters, /slam and Colonialism, 54-55.
107 Ibid., 56.

108 Ibid., 54-55,
109 Bonney, Jihad from Qur'an to bin Laden, 183-84,

110 Daniel Allen Butler, The First Jihad: The Battle for Khartoum and the Dawn of Militant
Islam (Casemate, 2006), 42.

111 Tbid., 43.

112 Peters, /sfam and Colonialism, 66-67.
113 Ibid., 69.

114 Ibid., 70.

115 Ibid., 79.

116 Butler, The First Jihad, 53-54,

117 Peters, Islam and Colonialism, 67.
118 Butler, The First Jihad, 105.

119 Ibid,

120 Ibid., 195-96,

Chapter Nine
1 Al-Misri, Reliance of the Traveller, section 09.1.
2 Ibid.

3. Rudolph Peters, Jihad in Classical and Modern Islam: A Reader (Markus Wiener Pub-
lishers, 1996), 53.

Peters, /slam and Colonialism, 86.
Ibid., 87.
6 = Thid., 90.

400

31

32

33
34
35

THe History oF JIHAD: From MuxHAMMaAD To ISIS

Ibid.

Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: Twentieth-century Conflict and the Descent of the
West (Penguin, 2006), 180.

Manus J. Midlarsky, The Killing Trap: Genocide in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge
University Press, 2005), 342.

“Turks Are Evicting Native Christians: Greeks and Armenians Driven From Homes and
Converted by the Sword, Assert Americans,” The New York Times, July 11, 1915.

Bonney, Jihad from Qur'an to bin Laden, 150-51.
Ibid., 151.

“Turkish Massacres: 47,000 Refugees Reach Mesopotamia,” The Times (London), Octo-
ber 11, 1918.

“Turks are Evicting Native Christians,” The New York Times, July 11, 1915.

“Frequently Asked Questions about the Armenian Genocide,” Armenian National Insti-
tute, http://www.armenian-genocide.org/genocidefaq.html; “700,000 Greeks Victims of
Turks,” The New York Times, July 10, 192).

Philip Mansel, Constantinople: City of the World's Desire, 1453-1924 (St. Martin’s Grif-
fin, 1995), 437.

“1930: The City of Constantinople Renamed to ‘Istanbul,” History.info, http://history.
info/on-this-day/1930-the-city-of-constantinople-renamed-to-istanbul,

Kevork B. Bardakjian, Hitler and the Armenian Genocide (Zoryan Institute, 1985), 17.
Kinross, The Ottoman Centuries, 410.

H.C. Armstrong, The Gray Wolf (Penguin Books, 1937), 206.

Ibid.

Mansel, Constantinople, 414.

Armstrong, The Gray Wolf, 205.

Alexci Vassiliev, The History of Saudi Arabia (New York University Press, 2000), 212-13.
Ibid., 221.

Ibid.

Ibid., 233.

Ibid., 284.

Ibid., 295.

Will Martin, “From an unexplored desert to a $2 trillion IPO: The 84-year history of Sau-
di Aramco in pictures,” Business Insider, December 4, 2017, https://www.businessinsider.
my/the-history-of-saudi-aramco-timeline-2017-11/.

Malo Tresca, “How Saudi Arabia exports Wahhabism,” LaCroix International, August
22, 201%, https://international.la-croix.com/news/how-saudi-arabia-exports-wahha-
bism/5095.

Carlotta Gall, “How Kosovo Was Tumed Into Fertile Ground for ISIS,” The New York
Times, May 21, 2016.

Ibid.
Ibid.
Tresca, “How Saudi Arabia exports Wahhabism.”

36

65
66

ENDNOTES 401

“What is Wahhabism? The reactionary branch of Islam from Saudi Arabia said to be ‘the main
source of global terrorism,’” The Telegraph, May 19, 2017, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/
news/2016/03/29/what-is-wahhabism-the-reactionary-branch-of-islam-said-to-be-the/,

Brynjar Lia, The Society of the Mustim Brothers in Egypt (Ithaca Press, 1998), 28.
Ibid.

Ibid., 33.

Tbid., 68-69, 75-76.

Ibid., 80.

Ibid., 153-54.

Tbid., 155.

Jonathan Raban, “Truly, madly, deeply devout,” The Guardian, March 2, 2002.
John Roy Carlson, Cairo to Damascus (Alfred A. Knopf, 1951), 89-90.

Shaker El-sayed, “Hassan al-Banna: The leader and the Movement,” Muslim American
Society, http://www.maschicago.org/library/misc_articles/hassan_banna.htm.

Carlson, Cairo to Damascus, 91.
Ibid., 91-92.

Robert Irwin, “Is this the man who inspired Bin Laden?” The Guardian, November 1,
2001.

John Calvert, “The World is an Undutiful Boy! Sayyid Qurb’s American experience,”
Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations 11, no. 1 (2000): 95, 99, 100.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Sayyid Qutb, Milestones, The Mother Mosque Foundation, n.d., 7.

Ibid., 10-11.

Ibid., 58.

Ibid., 58-59.

Ibid., 59-60.

Carlson, Cairo to Damascus, 92.

Ibid., 90-91.

Martin Kramer, “Fundamentalist Islam at Large: The Drive for Power,” Middle East
Quarterly (June 1996).

Calvert, “The World is an Undutiful Boy!” 94.

David Pryce-Jones, The Closed Circle: An Interpretation of the Arabs (Ivan R. Dee,
2002), 251-52.

Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (Vintage Books,
1996), 36.

Ibid.

Edy Cohen, “How the Mufti of Jerusalem Created the Permanent Problem of Palestinian
Violence,” The Tower, November 2015, http://www.thetower.org/article/how-the-muf-
ti-of-jerusalem-created-the-permanent-problem-of-palestinian-violence/.

402

67
68
69

70

Tne History or Jinap: From MunHammMap To ISIS

Ibid.
Ibid.

Jeffrey Herf, “Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Nazis and the Holocaust: The Origins, Na-
ture and Aftereffects of Collaboration,” Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, January 5,
2016, http://jcpa.org/article/haj-amin-al-husseini-the-nazis-and-the-holocaust-the-ori-
gins-nature-and-aftereffects-of-collaboration/.

Saul S. Friedman, A History of the Middle East (McFarland, 2006), 243; David G.
Dalin, “Hitler's Mufti,” First Things, August 2005, hteps://www.firstthings.com/arti-
cle/2005/08/hitlers-mufti.

Jeffrey Herf, Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World (Yale University Press, 2009), 125-26.

“The Arab Higher Committee: its origins, personnel and purposes, the documentary
record submitted to the United Nations, May, 1947,” (The Nation Associates, 1947).

Ibid.

Friedman, A History of the Middle East, 243.

Dalin, “Hitler’s Mufti.”

Gilbert Achcar, The Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab-Israeli War of Narratives (Hen-
ry Holt and Company, 2010), 157.

“Hajj Amin al-Husayni: Arab Nationalist and Muslim Leader,” United States Holocaust
Memorial Museum, https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?Moduleld=10007666.

Dalin, “Hitler’s Mufti.”
Ibid.

Richard Paul Mitchell, The Society of the Muslim Brothers (Oxford University Press,
1993), 56.

Ibid.

Joseph Lelyveld, His Final Battle: The Last Months of Franklin Roosevelt (Knopf Dou-
bleday Publishing Group, 2017), 79.

Joseph B. Schechtman, The United States and the Jewish State Movement: The Crucial
Decade, 1939-1949 (Herzl Press, 1966), 110.

Friedman, A History of the Middle East, 249,

David Barnett and Efraim Karsh, “Azzam’s Genocidal Threat,” Middle East Quarterly
(Fall 2011): 85-88.

Friedman, A History of the Middle East, 249.
Ibid.

Bruce Hoffman, Anonymous Soldiers: The Struggle for Israel, 1917-1947 (Knopf Dou-
bleday Publishing Group, 2015), 10.

Mark Urban, Generals: Ten British Commanders Who Shaped the World (Faber and
Faber, 2005), 233.

Bruce Hoffman, Anonymous Soldiers, 10-11.
Carlson, Cairo to Damascus, 110.

Ibid., 163.

Ibid., 60.

Al-Bukhari, Sahih al-Bukhari, vol. 4, bk. 56, no. 3030.

ENDNOTES 403

95 Jamie Glazov, “From Russia With Terror,” FrontPageMagazine.com, March 31, 2004,
http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=13975.

96 lon Mihai Pacepa, “The KGB’s Man,” The Wall Street Journal, September 22, 2003.
97 Ton Mihai Pacepa, “Russian Footprints,” National Review, August 24, 2006.

98 James Dorsey, “Wij zijn alleen Palestijn om politieke redden,” Trouw, March 31, 1977,
https://brabosh.com/2016/02/18/pqpct-bbo/

99 Ton Mihai Pacepa, “The KGB’s Man,”

100 “The Charter of Allah: The Platform of the Islamic Resistance movement (Hamas),” trans-
lated and annotated by Raphael Isracli, The International Policy Institute for Counter-Terror-
ism, April 5, 1998, http://www. ict.org.il/documents/documentdet.cfm?docids 14,

401 Ibid.
102 Ibid.
103 Ibid.
104 Ibid.
105 Ibid.
106 Ibid.

107 Esther Schapira and Georg M. Hafner, Muhammad Al Dura: the TV Drama: Qur Search
for the Truth in the Middle East Media War (La Maison d’Edition, 2016),

108 Sanjeev Nayyar, “So who was really responsible for Partition?” Rediff News, September
17, 2009, http://www.rediff.com/news/column/so-who-was-really-responsible-for-parti-
tion/20090917. htm,

109 Jeff Kingston, “The unfinished business of Indian partition,” The Japan Times, August 12,
2017.

110 Shamil Shams, “India’s partition and 70 years of proxy jihad,” DW, August 14, 2017,
http://www.dw.com/en/indias-partition-and-70-years-of-proxy-jihad/a-40083688.

111 Ibid.
112 Ibid.

113 Praveen Swami, India, Pakistan and the Secret Jihad: The Covert War in Kashmir, 1947-
2004, (Routledge, 2006), 53-54.

114 Hari Om Mahajan, “What's political now? It’s Islamic jihad,” The Pioneer, May 26,
2017, http://www.dailypioneer.com/columnists/big-story/whats-political-now-its-is~
lamic-jihad. html.

115 Bager Moin, Khomeini. Life of the Ayatollah (St. Martin's Press, 1999), 75.
116 Ibid., 78.
117 Ibid., 84.
118 Ibid., 88.

119 Ruhollah Khomeini, “Islamic Government,” in islam and Revolution: Writings and Dec-
larations of Imam Khomeini, translated by Hamid Algar (Mizan, 1981), 40.

120 Ibid.
121 Ibid., 55.

122 Homa Katouzian, The Persians: Ancient, Medieval and Modern Iran (Yale University
Press, 2009), 322.

404

123
124

125

126
127
128

129
130

138
139

140

141
142

143
144

145
146
147

148
149

Tue History or Jinan: From Munamman ro ISIS

Ibid.

Mark Bowden, Guests of the Ayatollah: The Iran Hostage Crisis—The First Battle in
America’s War with Militant Islam (Grove/Auantic, 2006), 70.

James Buchan, Days of God: The Revolution In Iran and Its Consequences (Simon &
Schuster, 2012), 257.

Ibid., 265.
Moin, Khomeini, 228.

“Tran Hostage Crisis Fast Facts,” CNN, December 25, 2015, updated October 20, 2017,
https://www.cnn.com/2013/09/15/world/meast/iran-hostage-crisis-fast-facts/index.html.

Elaine Sciolino, Persian Mirrors: The Elusive Face of Iran (Free Press, 2000), 68.

Shaul Bakhash, The Reign of the Avatollahs: lran and the Islamic Revolution (Basic
Books, 1990), 111, 221-22; Moin, Khomeini, 219-20.

Moin, Khomeini, 219.

Amir Taheri, The Spirit of Allah: Khomeini and the Islamic Revolution (Hutchinson,
1985), 20, 45.

Amir Taheri, Holy Terror: Inside the World af Islamic Terrorism (Sphere, 1987), 225-26.
Ibid., 226-27.
Taheri, The Spirit of Allah, 263-64.

“Iran Responsible for 1983 Marine Barracks Bombing, Judge Rules,” CNN, May 30,
2003, https://archive.li/TX460.

Gordon Thomas, “William Buckley: The Spy Who Never Came in from the Cold,” Cana-
da Free Press, October 25, 2006, https://canadafreepress.com/2006/thomas102506.htm.
Ibid.

“Hizballah’s Brash U.S. Supporters,” IPT News, November 18, 2010, https://www.in-
vestigativeproject.org/2331/hizballah-brash-us-supporters; “Hassan Nasrallah: In His
Own Words,” Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAM-
ERA), July 26, 2006, http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_context=7&x_issue=118cx_ar-
ticle=1158.

Phil Hirschkorn, Rohan Gunaratna, Ed Blanche, and Stefan Leader, “Blowback,” Jane 4
Intelligence Review, August 1, 2001.

Al-Misni, Reliance of the Traveller, section k29.5; r40,1-3.

Abdullah Azzam, “Who was Abdullah Azzam?” in Join the Caravan (Azzam Publica-
tions, 2001), 8.

Ibid., 9.

Tayseer Allouni with Usamah bin Laden, “A Discussion on the New Crusader Wars,”
translated by Muawiya ibn Abi Sufyan (Markaz Derasat, October 2001). Pious exclama-
tions of peace upon Muhammad removed for case of reading.

Azzam, Join the Caravan, 51.
Al-Bukhari, Sahih al-Bukhari, vol. 4, bk. 56, no. 2790, cf. Azzam, Join the Caravan, 40.

Tawfiq Tabib, “Interview with Sheikh al-Mujahideen Abu Abdel Aziz,” A/-Sirat Al-Mus-
tageem [The straight path), August 1994, http://Awww.seprin.com/laden/barbaros. html,

Azzam, Join the Caravan, 39.

Ibid., 39,

ENDNOTES 405

150 Ibid., 23.

151 “What is Wahhabism? The reactionary branch of Islam from Saudi Arabia said to be ‘the
main source of global terrorism,’” The Telegraph, May 19, 2017.

152 Andrew Wander, “A history of terror: Al-Qaeda 1988-2008,” The Guardian, July 12,
2008, https://www.theguardian.con/world/2008/jul/1 3/history.alqaida.

153 Gilles Kepel, Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam, translated by Anthony F. Roberts (The
Belknap Press, 2002), 250.

154 Tabib, “Interview with Sheikh al-Mujahideen Abu Abdel Aziz.”

155 Kerim Fenari, “The Jihad of Imam Shamyl,” Q-News, http://www.amina.com/article/
jihad_imamshamyl.html.

156 Mark Riebling and R. P. Eddy, “Jihad @ Work,” National Review, October 24, 2002.

157 Osama bin Laden, “Declaration of War against the Americans Occupying the Land of
the Two Holy Places,” August 1996, https://is.muni.cz/el/1423/jaro2010/MVZ203/
OBL__AQ__Fatwa_1996.pdf.

158 Ibid.
159 Ibid.
160 Ibid.

161 World Islamic Front, “Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders,” February 23, 1998, https://fas.
org/irp/world/para/docs/980223-fatwa.htm.

162 Ibid.
163 Ibid.
164 Wander, “A history of terror.”

165 Bill Clinton, “Remarks by the President to the Opening Session of the 53rd United Na-
tions General Assembly,” White House Press Release, September 21, 1998.

Chapter Ten

1 “Bin Laden: Goal is to bankrupt U.S..” CNN, November I, 2004, http://Avww.cnn.
com/2004/WORLD/meast/11/01/binladen.tape/.

2 ~~ Ibid.
Ibid.

4 Osama bin Laden, “Letter to the American People,” The Guardian, November 24, 2002,
hetps://www.theguardian,com/world/2002/nov/24/theobserver.

5 Ibid.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Walid bin ‘Attash, Ramzi bin As-Shibh, ‘Ali ‘Abd Al-’ Aziz
‘Ali, and “Mustafa Ahmed Al-Hawsawi, “The Islamic Response to the Government’s Nine
Accusations,” Jihad Watch, March I, 2009. https:/Avww.jihadwatch.org/2009/03/911-
defendants-we-ask-to-be-near-to-god-we-fight-you-and-destroy-you-and-terrorize-
you-the-jihad-in

7 “Islam is Peace’ Says President: Remarks by the President at Islamic Center of Washing-
ton, D.C.,” The White House, September 17, 2001. https://georgewbush-whitehouse.
archives.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010917-11.html.

Ibid.
9 Jim Sciutto, Ryan Browne, and Deirdre Walsh, “Congress releases secret ‘28 pages’ on

406

30

31

Tue Hrstrory or JIHAD: From MutiAMMAD TO ISIS

alleged Saudi 9/11 ties,” CNN, July 15, 2016, hteps://www.cnn.com/2016/07/15/poli-
tics/congress-releases-28-pages-saudis-9-11/index.html, Fred Kaplan, “The Idealist in
the Bluebonnets: What Bush’s meeting with the Saudi ruler really means,” S/ate, April
26, 2005, http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/war_stories/2005/04/the_ide-
alist_in_the bluebonnets.html; Alex Spillius, “Barack Obama criticised for ‘bowing’ to
King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia,” The Telegraph, April 8, 2009, https://www.telegraph.
co.uk/news/worldnews/barackobama/5128171/Barack-Obama-criticised-for-bowing-~
to- King-Abdullah-of-Saudi-Arabia.html.

“Declassified ‘28 pages’ on 9/11—full text,” CNN, July 15, 2016, https:/Awww.cnn.
com/2016/07/15/politics/28-pages-released-full-text/index.html.

Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.

Rowan Scarborough, “Saudi government funded extremism in U.S. mosques and chari-
ties: report,” The Washington Times, July 19, 2016, https://www.washingtontimes.com/
news/2016/jul/19/9 11 -report-details-saudi-arabia-funding-of-muslim-/.

“Declassified ‘28 pages’ on 9/11,” CNN.
Ibid.
Ibid.

Helene Cooper and Jim Rutenberg, “A Saudi Prince Tied to Bush Is Sounding Off-Key,”
The New York Times, April 29, 2007, http://Awww.nytimes.com/2007/04/29/washington/
29saudi.html.

Scarborough, “Saudi government funded extremism in U.S. mosques and charities: re-
port.”

“Declassified ‘28 pages’ on 9/11,” CNN,

Thid.

Ibid,

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Scarborough, “Saudi government funded extremism in U.S. mosques and charities: report,”
Ibid.

David Aufhauser, “An Assessment of Current Efforts to Combat Terrorism Financing,”
testimony of Hon. David D Aufhauser (Government Printing Office, June 15, 2004), 46.
Hearing before the Committee on Governmental Affairs, United States Senate. https://
www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pke/CHRG-108shrg95189/html/CHRG-108shrg95189.htm

Haviv Rettig, “Expert: Saudis have radicalized 80% of US mosques,” The Jerusalem
Post, December 5, 2005, http://www.jpost.com/International/Expert-Saudis-have-radi-
calized-80-percent-of-US-mosques.

Justin Huggler, “German vice-chancellor accuses Saudi Arabia of funding Islamic ex-
tremism in the West,” The Telegraph, December 6, 2015, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/
news/worldnews/europe/germany/12035838/German-vice-chancellor-accuses-Sau-
di-Arabia-of-funding-Istamic-extremism-in-the-West.html.

32

33

34

35

36
37
38
39
40

44
42
43
44
45
46

47

48

49

50

St

ENDNOTES 407

“Extremist Recruitment on the Rise in Southera Punjab,” WikiLeaks, November 13,
2008, https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/OSLAHORE302_a.html.

Office of the Secretary of State, “Terrorist Finance: Action Request for Senior Level En-
gagement on Terrorism Finance,” WikiLeaks, December 30, 2009, https:/Avikileaks.org/
plusd/cables/O9STATE131801_a.html.

Zaid Jilani, “In Secret Goldman Sachs Speech, Hillary Clinton Admitted No-Fly Zone
Would ‘Kill a Lot of Syrians,” The Intercept, October 10, 2016, https://theintercept.
com/2016/10/10/in-secret-goldman-sachs-speech-hillary-clinton-admitted-no-fly-
zone-would-kill-a-lot-of-syrians/,

“U.S. District Court Rules [ran Behind 9/11 Attacks.” PR Newswire, December 23, 2011,
https://www.pmewswire.com/news-releases/us-district-court-mules-iran-behind-9 | |-at-
tacks-136148008.htm!.

Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.

Kenneth R. Timmerman, “Iran’s Dirty 9/11 Secrets,” Frontpage Mag, September 8, 2011,
hetps://www. frontpagemag.com/fpm/104395/irans-dirty-91 1-secrets-kenneth-r-tim-
merman.

Ibid.
“U.S. District Court Rules [ran Behind 9/11 Attacks,” PR Newswire.
Timmerman, “Iran's Dirty 9/11 Secrets.”
Ibid.
“U.S. District Court Rules Iran Behind 9/11 Attacks,” PR Newswire.

United States District Court, Southern District of New York, affidavit of Clare M. Lo-
pez and Dr. Bruce D. Tefft, March 26, 2010. https://www.yumpu.com/en/document/
view/51049000/affidavit-of-clare-m-lopez-and-dr-bruce-d-tetft-iran-911-case
Timmerman, “Iran’s Dirty 9/11 Secrets.”

“U.S. District Court Rules Iran Behind 9/11 Attacks,” PR Newswire.

“9/1 | Lawsuit: Federal Court Awards $7 billion in final judgment against Iran and Hez-
bollah,”’ Winder & Counsel, n.d., http://www.winderfirm.com/library/9- | |-lawsuit-feder-
al-court-awards-7-billion-in-final-judgment.html.,

Daniel Beekman, “Terrorism Victims Win Right to Seize $500M Midtown Office Tower
Linked to Iran after Long Legal Battle,” The New York Daily News, April 2, 2014.

Josie Ensor, “Trove of Bin Laden documents reveal Iran's secret dealings with al-Qaeda,”
The Telegraph, November 1, 2017, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/201 7/11/01 /iran-
relationship-al-qaeda-revealed-newly-released-trove-bin/.

Helen Kennedy, “Israel Foe’s Donation Draws Flak,” The New York Daily News, January
10, 2002.

Ibid.; Kate O’Beime, “The Chaplain Problem,” National Review, October 27, 2003.
“Rally at Lafayette Park: Alamoudi,” IPT, October 28, 2000, https://www.investigative-
project.org/218/rally-at-lafayette-park-alamoudi.

Ibid.

58

59

60

61

62

63
64
65

66

67

68

69

70
71

72

73

74

-

/

76

Tue History oF JinAD: From MuHAMMAD TO ISIS

Ibid.

Mart Continetti, “Mueller’s Misstep: The FBI director befriends apologists for terror,”
National Review, June 12, 2002.

Mary Beth Sheridan and Douglas Farah, “Jailed Muslim Had Made a Name in Washing-
ton: Alamoudi Won Respect as a Moderate Advocate,” The Washington Post, December
1, 2003.

“Abdurahman Alamoudi Sentenced to Jail in Terrorism Financing Case,” Department of
Justice press release, October 15, 2004.

“Alamoudi Sentence Cut by Six Years,” IPT, July 25, 2011, https://www.investigativeproj-
ect.org/3059/alamoudi-sentence-cut-by-six-years.

Interview with Dick Cheney, moderated by Tim Russert, Meet the Press, September
14, 2003; transcript at http://www.nbenews.com/id/3080244/ns/meet_the_press/t/tran-
script-sept/#. WpYG-hPwaV4,

Mohamed Akram, “An Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the
Group in North America,” May 22, 1991, Government Exhibit 003-0085, U.S. vs. HLF,
et al, 7 (21).

Ibid.
Ibid.

United States Department of State, Tae Diplomatic Correspondence of the United States
of America, vol. 1, 605.

Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President on a New Beginning,” The White House,
June 4, 2009.

“Obama: ‘The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam,”” The
Washington Post, September 26, 2012.

Tomer Ovadia, “Rep. Keith Ellison: Bachmann ‘wanted attention,’” Politico, July
20, 2012. https://www.politico.com/story/20 1 2/07/ellison-bachmann-wanted-atten-
tion-078784

Jennifer Bendery, “Keith Ellison: Michele Bachmann Thinks Muslims ‘Are Evil,’”
Huffington Post, July 19, 2012, https:/Avww.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/19/keith-elli-
son-michele-bachmann_n_1688150.html,

“Democrats’ dilemma,” The Washingion Times, September 24, 2006.

Patrick Poole, “Rep. Keith Ellison Rewrites History on his Muslim Brotherhood, CAIR
Ties,” PJ Media, July 21, 2012, https://pjmedia.com/blog/rep-keith-ellison-rewrites-his-
tory-on-his-muslim-brotherhood-cair-ties/.

Ibid.

Mitch Anderson, “Ellison: Hajj was transformative,” StarTribune (Minneapolis/St. Paul),
December 18, 2008.

Ahmed Shawki, “A man and 6 of the Brotherhood in the White House!”
Rose El-Youssef, December 22, 2012. http://www. investigativeproject.org/3868/a-man-
and-6-of-the-brotherhood-in-the-white-house.

Ibid,

Robert Spencer, “Dhimmitude and stealth jihad at Fort Hood,” Jihad Watch, Decem-
ber 2, 2009 https://www. jihadwatch.org/2009/12/dhimmitude-and-stealth-jihad-at-
fort-hood; Brooks Egerton, “Syrian opposition figure trained U.S. soldiers but was
suspended over extremist ties after Fort Hood massacre,” Dallas Morning News,

Te

78

79

80

81

82

83

84

85

86

87

88

95

ENDNOTES 409

September 5, 2013. https://www.dallasnews.com/news/watchdog/2013/09/05/syrian-
opposition-figure-trained-u-s-soldiers-but-was-suspended-over-extremist-ties-after-
fort-hood-massacre

Ben Hubbard, “Islamist Rebels Create Dilemma on Syria Policy,” The New York Times,
April 27, 2013.

Adam Kredo, “Muslim Brotherhood Official, Former Clinton Foundation Employee Arrest-
ed,” Washington Free Beacon, September 18, 2013, http://freebeacon.com/national-security/
muslim-brotherhood-official-former-clinton-foundation-employee-arrested/.

Ibid.

Eileen F. Toplansky, “The Muslim Brotherhood and Weiner,” American Thinker, June
19, 2011, heeps://www.americanthinker.com/articles/201 1/06/the_muslim_brother-
hood_and_weiner.html.

“Huma Abedin & Hillary Clinton—Abedin Family Ties to Al-Qaeda,” Free Republic,
November 11, 2007, http://www. freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1924323/posts.

Andrew C. McCarthy, “The Huma Unmentionables,” National Review, July 24,2013, https://
www.nationalreview.con/blog/corner/huma-unmentionables-andrew-c-mccarthy/.

“FBI removes hundreds of training documents after probe on treatment of Islam,” Fox
News, February 21, 2012, http://www. foxnews.com/politics/2012/02/2 1/fbi-purges-hun-
dreds-training-documents-after-probe-on-treatment-islam.html.

“CAIR: Jesse Jackson, ICNA Endorse Letter on Anti-Islam FBI Training,” Council on
American-Islamic Relations press release, August 6, 2010.

Spencer Ackerman, “FBI Teaches Agents: ‘Mainstream’ Muslims Are ‘Violent, Radi-
cal,’” Wired, September 14, 2011, https://www.wired.com/2011/09/fbi-muslims-radical/.
Associated Press, “FBI drops lecture that was critical of Islam,” NDTV, September
16, 2011, https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/fbi-drops-lecture-that-was-critical-of-
islam-467796.

Salam al-Marayati, “The wrong way to fight terrorism,” The Los Angeles Times, October
19, 2011.

“Letter to DHS John Brennan on FBI’s Use of Biased Experts and Training Materials,”
Muslim Advocates, October 27, 2011. https://www.muslimadvocates.org/letter-to-dhs-
john-brennan-on-fbis-use-of-biased-experts-and-training-materials/

Thid.
Ibid.

Letter from John Brennan to Farhana Khera, November 3, 2011, in “Emerson, IPT Expose
Brennan Letter: FBI Training ‘Substandard and Offensive’ to Muslims” by AWR Haw-
kins, Breitbart, February 8, 2013, http://www. breitbart.com/big-govermment/2013/02/08/
nov-3-201 1-letter-from-john-brennan-capitulating-to-muslim-complaints-against-fbi/.

Ibid.
Ibid.

John Brennan, “A New Approach for Safeguarding Americans,” Center for Strategic and
International Studies, August 6, 2009, http://csis.org/files/attachments/090806_bren-
nan_transcript.pdf.

Steven Emerson and John Rossomando, “Obama CIA Nominee Juhn Brennan Wrong for
the Job,” IPT, February 5, 2013, https://www.investigativeproject.org/3902/obama-cia-
nomince-john-brennan-wrong-for-the-job.

410

96

97

98

99

100
101
102
103

104

105

106

108

109

110

111

112

Tue History oF JinAp: From MukAMMAD TO ISIS

“Counterterror Adviser Defends Jihad as ‘Legitimate Tenct of Islam,” Fox News, May
27, 2010, http://www. foxnews.com/politics/2010/05/27/counterterror-adviser-de-
fends-jihad-legitimate-tenet-islam.html.

“CAIR Welcomes New Security Strategy’s Focus on Confronting Al-Qaeda,” Council
on American-Islamic Relations press release, May 27, 2010, http://cairunmasked.org/
wp-contenUuploads/2010/06/quote.pdf,

John Brennan, “Securing the Homeland by Renewing America’s Strengths, Resilience,
and Values,” Center for Strategic and International Studies, May 26, 2010, http://
www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/remarks-assistant- president-homeland-securi-
ty-and-counterterrorism-john-brennan-csi,

“WH counter-terrorism adviser Brennan storms out of TWT offices,” The Washington
Times, August 23, 2010.

Ibid.
Ibid,
Ibid.

Manasi Gopalakrishnan, “Islamic State’ reportedly training terrorists to enter Europe as
asylum seekers,” DW, November 14, 2016, http:/Awww.dw.com/en/islamic-state-report-
edly-training-terrorists-to-enter-europe-as-asylum-seekers/a-36389389.

Jacob Bojesson, “German Intel Agency Says Hundreds of Jihadis Arrived Among Ref-
ugees,” The Daily Caller, July 5, 2017, http://dailycaller.com/2017/07/05/german-in-
tel-agency-says~hundreds-of-jihadis-arrived-among-refugees/.

Julian Robinson, “Angela Merkel under more pressure over refugee policy as it is revealed
migrants committed 142,500 crimes in Germany during the first six months of 2016,”
Daily Mail, November 1, 2016, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3893436/Ange-
la-Merkel-pressure-refugee-policy-revealed-migrants-committed-142-500-crimes-Ger-
many-six-months-2016.html.

Ivar Arpi, “It’s not only Germany that covers up mass sex attacks by migrant men...
Sweden’s record is shameful,” The Spectator, December 27, 2016, https://www.spectator.
co.uk/201 6/01 /its-not-only-germany-that-covers-up-mass-sex-attacks-by-migrant-men-
swedens-record-is-shameful/.

“Opinion: Welcome to Sweden, the rape capital of the world,” NA, February 28, 2017,
http://www.na.se/opinion/ledare/opinion-welcome-to-sweden-the-rape-capital-of-the-
world.

Michael Qazvini, “How Muslim Migration Made Malmo, Sweden a Crime Capital,” Dai-
ly Wire, January 16, 2017, https:/Avww.dailywire.com/news/]2466/how-muslim-migra-
tion-made-malmo-sweden-crime-michael-qazvini.

Nicolai Sennels, “Dangerous refugees: Afghan Muslim migrants 79 times more likely to
rape,” Jihad Watch, July 1, 2017, https://www.jihadwatch.org/2017/07/dangerous-refu-
gees-afehan-muslim-migrants-79-times-more-likely-to-rape,

“Rotherham child abuse scandal: 1,400 children exploited, report finds,” BBC News, Au-
gust 26, 2014, http://www. bbc.com/news/uk-england-south-yorkshire-28939089,

Przemek Skwirezynski, “Polish MP: Germans Going to Great Lengths to Cover
Crimes of Their Arab Guests,” Breitbart, July 30, 2016, http:/Awww.breitbart.com/lon-
don/2016/07/30/polish-mp-germans-going-great-lengths-cover-crimes-arab-guests/.

Liam Deacon, “Claim: Dutch Police Bribe Newspaper to Bury Data on Criminal Asy-
lum Seekers,” Breitbart, May 4, 2017, http://www.breitbart.cormn/london/2017/05/04/

ENDNOTES 411

dutch-police-allegedly-bribe-newspaper-tu-bury-data-on-criminal-asylum-seekers/;
Donna Rachel Edmunds, “Swedish Police Stop Reporting Suspects’ Ethnicity for Fear
of Being Branded Racist,” Breitbart, January 15, 2016, http://www, breitbart.com/lon-
don/2016/01/15/2784799/.

113 Pope Francis, “Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium of the Holy Father Francis
to the Bishops, Clergy, Consecrated Persons and the Lay Faithful on the Proclamation
of the Gospel in Today's World,” The Holy See, November 24, 2013, http://w2.vati-
can.va/content/francesco/en/apost_exhortations/documents/papa-francesco_esortazi-
one-ap_20131124_evangelii-gaudium.htnl.

114 Philip Pullella, “After Paris attacks, Pope speaks out against insulting religions,” Reuters,
January 15, 2015, https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-france-shooting-pope/after-paris-at-
tacks-pope-speaks-out-against-insulting-religions-idU KKBNOKO16Q20150115.

115 Pope Francis, “Message of His Holiness Pope Francis on the Occasion of the World Meet-
ings of Popular Movements in Modesto (California) [16-18 February 20t7],”" The Holy
See, February 10, 2017, https://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/messages/pont-mes-
sages/2017/documents/papa-francesco_20170210_movimenti-popolari-modesto.html.

116 Ibid.

117 Else Harris, “Vatican, al-Azhar focus on papal trip speeches in latest meeting,” Cath-
olic News Agency, July 7, 2017, https://www. Satie lisneve a ence Seth neNsIratioae” al-
azhar-focus-on-papal-trip-speeches-in-latest-mecting-88693.

118 Thomas D. Williams, “Pope Francis Welcomes Leader of Muslim World League to
Vatican,” Breitbart, September 21, 2017, http://www.breitbart.com/national-secun-
ty/2017/09/21/pope-francis-welcomes-leader-of-muslim-world-league-to-vatican/.

119 Ibid.

120 “Message of His Holiness Pope Francis For the Celebration of the 51st World Day
of Peace,” The Holy See, January 1, 2018, http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/
messages/peace/documents/papa-francesco_20171113_messaggio-5lgiornatamondi-
ale-pace2018. html.

121 Gopalakrishnan, “Islamic State’ reportedly training terrorists to enter Europe as asylum
seekers.”

122 Hannah Roberts, “ISIS threatens to send 500,000 migrants to Europe as a ‘psychological
weapon’ in chilling echo of Gaddafi’s prophecy that the Mediterranean ‘will become a sea of
chaos,” Daily Mail, February 18, 2015, http;/Awww.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-29585 17/
The-Mediterranean-sea-chaos-Gaddafi-s-chilling-prophecy-interview-IS1S-threat-
ens-send-500-000-migrants-Europe-psychological-weapon-bombed. html,

123 Jack Blanchard, “Officials warn 20,000 ISIS jihadis ‘have infiltrated Syrian refugee
camps,” Mirror, September 14, 2015, https://www,mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/offi-
cials-warn-20000-isis-jthadis-64435 16.

124 Jan Drury, “Four out of five migrants are not from Syria: EU figures expose the ‘lie’ that
the majority of refugees are fleeing war zone,” Daily Mail, September 18, 2015, hetp://
www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3240010/Number-refugees-arriving-Europe-soars-
85-year-just-one-five-war-torn-Syria.html.

125 Aaron Brown, “Just wait...’ Islamic State reveals it has smuggled thousands of ex-
tremists into Europe,” Express, November 18, 2015, https://www.express.co.uk/news/
world/555434/Islamic-State-ISIS-Smuggler- THOUSANDS-Extremists-into-Eu-
rope-Refugees.

412

126

127

128

129
130

131

132

133
134
135
136
pK
138
139

140

141
142
143

144

145

146

147

148

Tne Hisrory or Jin ap: From MuHammanp vo ISIS

Ibid.

John Irish, “French security chief warns Islamic State plans wave of attacks in France,”
Reuters, May 19, 2016, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-trance-sccurity/french-secu-
rity-chief-warns-islamic-state-plans-wave-of-attacks-in-france-idUSKCNOYA1HO.

DPA, “Pope denounces Christians who don’t want refugees as ‘hypocrites,” EBL
News, October 13, 2016, https://eblnews.com//news/world/pope-denounces-chris-
tians-who-dont-want-refugees-hypocrites-40253?.

Ibid.

Bridget Johnson, “ISIS Group Releases Image of ‘Beheaded’ Pope Francis,” PJ Media,
November 17, 2017, https://pjmedia.com/homeland-security/isis-group-rcleases-im-
age-beheaded-pope-francis/.

Jon Dean, “Why we hate you’: [SIS reveal 6 reasons why they despise Westerners in
jihadi magazine,” Mirror, August 1, 2016. hetps://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/
why-isis-hate-you-reasons-8533563

Islamic State, “This is the Promise of Allah,” June 29, 2014, htep://myreader.toile-libre.
org/uploads/My_53b039f00cb03.pdf.

Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.

“Isis video ‘shows al-Baghdadi alive’ after death rumours,” BBC News, July 5, 2014,
http://www.bbe.com/news/av/world-middle-cast-28 | 78272/isis-video-shows-al-baghda-
di-alive-after-death-rumours.

Abu Bakr al-Husayni al-Qurashi al-Baghdadi, “A Message to the Mujahidin and the

Muslim Ummah in the Month of Ramadan,” Al-Hayat Media Center, n.d., https://
scholarship.tricolib,brynmawr.edw/bitstream/handle/10066/14241/ABB20140701.pdf.

Ibid.

Ibid.

“Crowd Gathers to Show Support of ISIS Takeover of Mosul,” MEMRI, June 12, 2014,
https://Awww.memri.org/tv/crowd-gathers-show-support-isis-takeover-mosul.

Brittany M. Hughes, “State Dept. on Beheading of U.S. Journalist: ‘This Is Not About
the United States,” CNS News, August 21, 2014, https://www.cnsnews.com/news/arti-
cle/brittany-m-hughes/state-dept-beheading-us-journalist-not-about-united-states.

Reena Flores, “CIA director on ISIS: They aren't Muslims—they're ‘psychopathic thugs,”
CBS News, March 13, 2015, https:/Avww.cbsnews.com/news/cia-dircctor-isis-not-mus-
lims-psychopathic-thugs/.

“French govt to use Arabic ‘Dacsh’ for Islamic State group,” France 24, September 18,
2014, updated December 5, 2015, http://www.france24.com/en/20140917-france-switch-
es-arabic-daesh-acronym-islamic-state.

Abu Muhammad al-Adnani ash-Shami, “Indeed Your Lord Is Ever Watchful,” Septem-
ber 21, 2014, https://1a801400.us.archive.org/34/items/mir225/English_Translation.pdf.

Al-Misri, Reliance of the Traveller, section 09.13.

149

150

151

1$2

153

154
155

156

157

158

159

160
16

162

ENDNOTES 413

“Video: Kuwaiti Activist: ‘1 Hope that Kuwait Will Enact a Law for..,Sex Slaves,’” Jihad
Watch, June 22, 2011. https://www.jihadwatch.org/2011/06/i-hope-that-kuwait-will-en-
act-the-law-forsex-slaves

“Islamic State (ISIS) Publishes Penal Code, Says It Will Be Vigilantly Enforced,” MEM-
RI, December 17, 2014, hetps://www.memri.org/jttm/islamic-state-isis-publishes-penal-
code-says-it-will-be-vigilantly-enforced.

Al-Bukhari, Sahih al-Bukhari, vol. 8, bk, 86, no. 6829.

Abu Dawud, Sunan Abu Dawud, English Transtation with Explanatory Notes, translated
by Ahmad Hasan (Kitab Bhavan, 1990), Section 38, number 4447.

Bethan McKernan, “Hillary Clinton emails leak: Wikileaks documents claim Dem-
ocratic nominee ‘thinks Saudi Arabia and Qatar fund Isis,’” Independent, October 11,
2016, — http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/politics/hillary-clinton-emails-leak-
wikileaks-saudi-arabia-qatar-isis-podesta-latest-a7355466. html.

Time Magazine, July 1, 2013.

Amel Hecimovic, “Rohingya Muslims flee ethnic violence in Myanmar - in pictures,” The
Guardian, September 17, 2017.

Wa Lone, “Myanmar military denies atrocities against Rohingya, replaces general,” Reu-
ters, November 13, 2017.

“Myanmar: 71 dead in militant attacks on police, border posts,” Associated Press, August
25, 2017

Aye Chan, “The Development of a Muslim Enclave in Arakan (Rakhine) State of Burma
(Myanmar),” SOAS Bulletin of Burma Research, Vol. 3, No. 2, Autumn 2005, p. 399.

Aye Chan, “The Development of a Muslin Enclave in Arakan (Rakhine) State of Burma
(Myanmar),” SOAS Bulletin of Burma Research, Vol. 3, No. 2, Autumn 2005, p. 406,

Kyaw Zan Tha, “Background of Rohingya Problem,” Scribd, December 28, 2008.

Angsuman Chakraborty, “Complete Background of Rohingya crisis,” Medium, Septem-
ber 15, 2017.

Angsuman Chakraborty, “Complete Background of Rohingya crisis,” Medium, Septem-
ber 15, 2017.

163 George Sprantzes, “Constantine Palaologus XJ speaks before his officers and allies before the

final siege of Constantinople by the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed Bey,” World Historia, June 24,
2009, http://www.worldhistoria.com/speech-by-constantine-xi_topic124058.html.

164 Al-Bukhari, Satis al-Bukhari, vol. 4, bk. 56, no. 2977.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book represents the crown and summit of everything I have to say that
anyone who doesn't know me personally may care to listen to. I’ve written a
guide to the Qur’an and a biography of Muhammad, and with this book, the
case is complete—that is, the case that there are elements within Islam that
pose a challenge to free societies, and that free people need to pay attention
to this fact before it is, quite literally, too late. It is necessary for me to repeat
yet again that this does not mean that every individual Muslim, or any given
Muslim, embodies that challenge and is posing it individually, but as this
book makes clear, the Islamic jihad imperative remains regardless of whether
or not any Muslim individual decides to take it up.

I am grateful to David S. Bernstein of Bombardier Books for giv-
ing me the chance to write this book, and for his and the careful and
insightful editorial touch of Elena Vega and J. M. Martin. Thanks also
to Hugh Fitzgerald, the most erudite and engaging commentator on
the contemporary scene, for his extraordinarily helpful suggestions and
guidance; Pamela Geller for alerting me to some original and import-
ant documents on the Mufti of Jerusalem; and Ibn Warraq for his keen
historian’s eye. I’m grateful also to the eagle-eyed Loren Rosson for his
proofreading help.

Hugh and Christine Douglass-Williams have valiantly held the fort
at our news and commentary site on contemporary jihad activity, Jihad
Watch (www.jihadwatch.org), which is held together in the face of reg-
ular and massive cyber jihad assaults by the mysterious and indefatigable
technical expert known to the world only as Marc. What would I do
without them, or without David Horowitz and Mike Finch of the David
Horowitz Freedom Center, whose ongoing support makes it all possible?

416 THe History or Jinavp: From MuUHAMMAD to ISIS

There are so many others. As always, I cannot name them all, for
fear of giving today’s jihadis marching orders. But I would be remiss if I
did not once again thank the man without whom none of this would ever
have happened, Mr. Jeffrey Rubin.

If any of my work over the years has had any value, I owe it to these
folks, and to the others who shine no less brightly for remaining unnamed.

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Reinhart Dozy, Spanish Islam: A History of the Muslims in Spain, translated by Francis Griffin
Stokes (Goodword Books, 2001).

420 Tue Hisrory or Jinap: From MuntAmMManp To ISIS

Dario Fernandez-Morera, The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise (ISI Books, 2016).
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Harris Jones (Williams & Norgate, 1858).

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The Abbasid Caliphate

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olution, translated by John Alden Williams (State University of New York Press, 1985).

Abu Ja’far Muhammad bin Jarir al-Tabari, The History of al-Tabart, vol. 32, The Reunification of
the Abbasid Caliphate, translated by C. E. Bosworth (State University of New York Press,
1987).

The Crusades

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Carole Hillenbrand, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives (Routledge, 2000),

Amin Maalouf, The Crusades Through Arab Eyes (Schocken Books, 1984).

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Kenneth Meyer Setton, The Papacy and the Levant, 1204-1571: The thirteenth and fourteenth
centurtes (American Philosophical Society, 1976).

Slavery

Murray Gordon, Slavery in the Arab World (New Amsterdam Books, 1989).

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Eunuchs,” Paideuma 45 (1999),

Joseph Kenny, The Spread of Islam Through North to West Africa (Dominican Publications, 2000).
Bernard Lewis, Race and Slavery in the Middle East (Oxford University Press, 1994).

BislioGRAPHY 421

Giles Milton, White Gold: The Extraordinary Story of Thomas Pellow and Islam's One Million
White Slaves (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004),

Ronald Segal, Islam's Black Slaves: The Other Black Diaspora (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001).

The Jihad in India and Central Asia

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H. A. R. Gibb, The Arab Conguests in Central Asia (AMS Press, 1970).

Sita Ram Goel, The Story of Islamic Imperialism in India (Voice of India, 1982).
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Major David Price (Oriental Translation Committee, 1829).

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(Hafiz Press, 1875).

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Derryl N. MacLean, Religion and Society in Arab Sind (Brill, 1989).

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lishing, 2009).

Justin Marozzi, Tamerlane: Sword of Islam, Conqueror of the World (Da Capo Press, 2004).

Rudolph Peters, ds/am and Colontalism: The Doctrine of Jihad in Modern History (Mouton Pub-
lishers, 1979).

Arun Shourie, Harsh Narain, Jay Dubashi, Ram Swarup, and Sita Ram Goel, //indu Temples:
What Happened to Them, 2 vols. (Voice of India, 1990).

Vincent Arthur Smith, The Oxford History of India: From the Earliest Times to the End of 1911
(Clarendon Press, 1920).

Praveen Swami, India, Pakistan and the Secret Jihad: The Covert War in Kashmir, 1947-2004,
(Routledge, 2006).

The Assassins

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Cordier (John Murray, 1920).

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lia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 45, no. 2/3 (1991).

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(Oriental Translation Fund, 1830).

422 Tue History oF JiniaAp: FROM MuHAMMAD TO ISIS

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BIBLIOGRAPHY 423

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2012).

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2009).

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424 Tre History or Jirap: From MuxwAMMAD TO ISIS

Elaine Sciolino, Persian Mirrors: The Elusive Face of Iran (Free Press, 2000).

Robert Spencer, The Complete Infidel’s Guide to Iran (Regnery, 2016).

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Al-Qaeda

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Press, 2002).

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ISIS

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PDF created by Rajesh Arya - Gujarat

Dates

1002, 124, 137

1054, 141, 196

1055, 137-138

1077, 141

1154, 155

1354, 186

1404, 212

1526, 221-222, 231, 234
9/11 attacks, 332, 340, 407
O27,112

939, 118-119

950, 113

961, 103, 122

A

Abbas ibn Abd al-Muttalib, 95

Abbasid caliph al-Ma’mun, 103, 105

Abbasid caliph al-Mahdi, 98 Abd al-Mu'min al-Gumi, 171 Abd al-Rahman IM], 118-122
Abdallah ibn Amir al-Hadrami, 68

Abdul Qadir Badauni, 177 Abdul-Aziz ibn Saud, 294 Abdullah Azzam, 322, 354, 404, 424

Abdullah ibn Saud, 259

AbdulRahman al-Ghafigi, 93-94

Abdurrahman Alamoudi, 341
Abolghasem Mesbahi, 338
Abraham, 16, 66, 150, 312

Abu Abdel Aziz Barbaros, 324 Abu Ali al-Mansur al-Hakim, 142 Abu Bakr, 18, 47-52, 54-55,

65,
92,363, 377, 412
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, 363
Abu Hafs, 103

Abu Muhammad Adnani, 365

Abu Sa’id al-Khadri, 32

Abu Sufyan, 25, 29, 37, 56, 71, 95

Abu Talib, 70
Adolf Hitler, 95, 292, 303

Ahmad Shah Durrani, 273, 275

426 Tur History of JiHAbD: From Mut¥AMMAD TO ISIS

Ahmad Yadgar, 217

Ahmed al-Tayeb, 358

Ahmed ibn Arabshah, 213

Akbar Shah Najeebabadi, 60, 376
Akbar the Great, 234, 237, 241-242, 244, 248-249
Al-Akram Fada’il, 204

Al-Amir bi-Ahkamillah, 135

al-Agsa Mosque, 150, 327

al-Azimi, 150

al-Hakam b. Hisam, 122

al-Harith tribe, 43

al-Madai’in of Kisra, 28

al-Mu'tasim, 106-107

Al-Mughirah, 58

al-Mutawakkil HI, 220

Al-Nu’man ibn Mugarrin, 58
Al-Qaeda, 322-330, 337-342, 345, 347, 353-354, 365, 401, 405-410, 424
Alauddin Khalji, 178

Albert of Aix, 147, 149

Alexius Comnenus, 147, 152

Alfonso VI, 126-127, 383, 420
Alfonso VIII, 173-174

Alfred Lord Tennyson, 101

Ali ibn Abi Talib, 32, 48, 67, 95 Ali ibn Muhammad al-Nagqi, 111 Ali Pasha, 259, 261, 263-264
Ali’s Troubled Caliphate, 68
Almanzor, 123-124

Almohads, 171-175

Almoravids, 126-128, 171, 258

Alp Arslan, 138~141

Amin al-Husseini, 301, 307, 309, 402
Amin Maalouf, 151, 163, 386, 420
Amr ibn al-As, 62, 69, 73

Amr ibn Hisham (Abu Jahl), 18-19
Andrew C, McCarthy, 348, 409
Andronicus II, 184

Angela Merkel, 355, 410
Anglo-Jewish Association, 266-267
Ansar (helpers), 26, 48, 109, 154, 274
Answer to the World’s Problems, 298
Anti-Muslim bigotry, 369

Antioch, 105, 142, 148, 152-153, 156-157, 163, 166, 183
Apostasy Wars, 49, 51-52

INDEX 427

Arab invaders, 47

Arabian Peninsula, 44, 56, 294
Archbishop Daimbert, 150, 386
Archbishop Germanos, 260
Archduke Ferdinand of Austria, 223
Anf Jamal, 315

Aristakes Lastivertsi, 137

Armenia, 64-65, 99, 111, 137, 165
Armenian Genocide, 267, 290~291, 397-398, 400, 422-423
Arnold of Liibeck, 158

Arthur Derounian, 298, 308

Asad ibn Abdallah al-Qasri, 91
Asbagh ibn Wakil, 104

Ashras ibn Abdallah al-Sulami, 91

Asia Minor, 100, 104-107, 136-137, 139-141, 143, 151, 155, 165, 181-182, 187, 191, 193,
197, 200,219, 267

Assadollah Alam, 316
Assassins, 156, 159-160, 162, 182, 386, 388, 421
Aswad al-Ansi, 49-50 Atsiz bin Uwaq, 141 Attiyah al-Qurazi, 30
Aurangzch, 244-250, 292
Aurangzeb’s death, 250
Ayatollah Khamenei, 339-340
Ayman al-Zawahiri, 339
Ayub Khan, 315
Azad al-Husaint, 273

B

Badr, 18-21, 23-26, 45-46, 56,
65, 119, 154, 277, 284, 364
Balian of Ibelin, 164

Banu al-Mustaliq, 32

Banu Hanifah chieftains, 51
Banu Janbah, 44

Banu Nadir, 22, 27, 35, 45

Banu Qaynuqa, 22

Banu Qurayza, 22, 29-30, 101
Barack Obama, 116, 311, 333, 343, 346, 348, 353, 365, 367, 383, 406, 408
Barbary States, 231, 270, 272
Barbary Wars, 270, 398, 422
Baron Wenceslas Wradislaw, 221
Battle of the Camel in Basra, 68
Battle of the Trench, 29, 95

428 Tut History or Jinap: From MunammMap TO ISIS

Battle of Yarmouk, 55

Benedict XVI, 195, 357, 389

Beni Madho, 248

Bethlehem Monastery of St. Theodosius, 142
Bigotry, 345, 347, 369

Bilad as-Saqaliba, 83

Bill Clinton, 150, 295, 327, 341, 405
Brahmanabad, 84-85

British colonialism, 279

British colonialists, 276

British Raj, 272

Buddhist temple, 86, 133

Busnavi's language, 252

Byzantine Empire, 41, 54, 64, 71, 99-100, 103-104, 143, 152, 169, 181, 184, 186, 194-195,
197, 200, 419

Cc

Caliph al-Mansur, 142

Caliph al-Mutawakkil, 109, 111
Caliph alMu'tazz bi-’llah, 111
Caliphate of Umar, 36

Calixtus III, 200

Cantar de Mio Cid, 128

Catholic Church, 356~358
Catholics, 223, 356

Charles XII, 251

Chechen Independence Fight, 325
Church of Constantinople, 141
Church of Rome, 141

Church of the Holy Sepulchre, 61
Church of the Resurrection, 142-143
CIA memorandum, 335

Clare M. Lopez, 339, 407

Colonial Powers, 264, 280

Colonial Rule, 280, 288
Confederates, 29 Conquering North Africa, 73 Conquering Sindh, 84
Conquering Spain, 81

Conquest of Iraq, 52, 378, 418 Conrad of Montferrat, 162 Constantine LX, 137-138
Constantine XI, 370-371

Constantinople, 39, 71, 88-89, 98-100, 106-107, 136, 139-142, 146-147, 165, 167, 183-186,
190-191, 196-201, 218, 221-224, 227-229, 251, 256, 259, 261, 268, 291-292, 369, 371,
390, 400, 413, 420, 422

INdEX 429

Council of Florence, 197

Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), 343-346, 350-351, 354, 408-410
Count Julian’s rage, 77

Counterterrorism (CT), 295, 334, 348, 350-352, 410

Crete, 72, 74, 102-103, 142, 221, 229-230, 260, 385

Crimean War, 262

Crucifixion, 122-123

Crusader Barbarism, 148

Crusader states, 152-153, 158, 177, 181

Crusaders in Jerusalem, 149

Crusades, 143, 145, 147, 151, 163, 169-170, 181, 356, 378, 385-387, 420
Cyprus, 66, 100, 142, 221, 225-228, 265

D

David D. Aufhauser, 335

Debacle at Manzikert, 139

Defensive Jihad, 287-288, 302, 313, 325, 330
Demise of the Caliphate, 292

Dhimma, 57, 61, 202, 397

Dhimmi Christians, 117

Dhimmi Oppression, 202

Dhimmituide, 135, 253, 265, 378, 408, 419
Dick Cheney, 342, 408

Dieter Wisliczeny, 303

Dihya ibn Khalifa, 36

Disunity, 111, 148, 164, 174, 182

Divine Liturgy, 107, 261

Divine Terrer, 27

Donald Trump, 337, 367

E

Edmund Allenby, 308

Edward Gibbon, 94, 379, 419

Efraim Karsh, 402

El Cid, 126, 128

Elias Bou Saab, 359 Emeka Ojukwu, 321 Emirate of Cordoba, 115
Emperor Constantine XI, 371

Emperor Leo III, 88

Emperor Michael Ii, 103

Enforced subjugation, 108

430 Tue History or Jinan: From MunamMMapb To ISIS

Enslavement, 32, 101, 187, 218, 231, 316
Enter Napoleon, 256
Eyiib Sabri Pasha, 258

F

Fall of Al-Andalus, 217

Fall of Constantinople, 198, 200, 218, 390, 420
Fall of the Shah, 316, 318

Fall of the Umayyads, 95
Farhana Khera, 351, 353, 409
Fatimid Shiite Caliph, 113
Fatos Makolli, 295

Fayruz al-Nihawandi, 65

FBI Headquarters, 335

Fifth Crusade, 165

First Battle of Panipat, 234

First Caliphate Controversy, 47
First Crusade, 145, 147, 152, 169
Firuz Shah Tughlag, 206-207
France’s DGSI, 359

Frederick Barbarossa, 156, 164

G

Gabriel, 18, 28-30, 203, 336
Gamel Abdel Nasser, 301

Gehad El-Haddad, 347

George B. Daniels, 337

George W. Bush, 331, 333, 341-342
Ghazi ibn al-Wasiti, 83
Ghiyasuddin Balban, 177
Godfrey Goodwin, 188, 389, 422
Godfrey of Bouillon, 152

Great Schism, 141, 189, 196
Greek Independence, 259-260

H

Hadith collections, 11, 285

Hajjaj ibn Yusuf, 84

Hamas, 311-313, 321-322, 336, 341, 343, 345-346, 348-349, 351, 403, 423
Hanbali, 12-13

Harun al-Rashid, 98-99, 101, 104, 106, 135, 366

INDEX 431

Hasan al-Banna, 296, 308
Hasan Ali Khan, 246-247
Hasan ibn al-Nu’man, 74
Hasan ibn Ali al-Askari, 70, 72, 111
Hassan Nasrallah, 321, 404
Hatt-i Humayun decree, 262
Havlish, 337-340

Heraclius, 39-40, 54, 56, 199
Heroic Lion, 138

Hijrah to Medina, 48
Himyar, 43

Hinduism, 84-85, 87, 175-180, 206-212, 215-216, 234-243, 245-246, 248-250, 272-273,
275,278, 280

Hindustan, 84, 132-133, 135, 179, 210, 214, 250
Hisham al-Reda, 102

Hisham ibn Abdel! Malik, 92, 96

Hizbul Mujadeen (HM), 315-316

Holdout, 82, 93

Holocaust, 302, 307, 402, 423

Holy Land Foundation, 343

Holy League, 226-227

Hudhaifa bin al-Yaman, 67

Huma Abedin, 347, 409

Hunayn, 38, 46

Husain Quli Khan, 238 Huyayy bin Akhtab, 36 Hypocrites, 23, 210, 412

I

Ibn Abd al-Hakam, 77-78, 80,
380, 420

Ibn al-Athir, 148, 154

Ibn al-Jawzi, 138, 150

Tbn al-Qalanisi, 150

Tbn Hayyan of Cordoba, 118
Ibn Hazm, 121

Ibn Hubayrah, 88-89

Ibn Ishaq, 17, 24, 30-32, 35, 37, 45, 373, 417
Ibn Jubayr, 153

Ibn Khaldun, 13, 373

Ibn Naggash, 202-203

Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya, 169
Ibn Sunayna, 24

Ibn Taghribirdi, 150, 203-204

432 THE History oF Jinap: From MunammMap To ISIS

Ibn Taymiyya, 13, 168, 182, 287,

323, 373

Ybn Warraq, 415

Ibrahim Lodi, 234

Ibrahirn Pasha, 221

Idris bin Muhammad al-Mahdi as-Sanusi, 288
Imad ad-Din Zengi, 153

Imad Mughniyah, 339

imperial capital of Ctesiphon, 54, 59

Impious, 25, 61, 90, 96, 211, 227, 370

India, 11, 52, 77, 84-85, 88, 130-132, 134-135, 175, 177-178, 205-206, 209-210, 213-214,
217-218, 220, 225, 233, 236, 239, 242-244, 273, 275-280, 286, 314-315, 336, 369, 380,
384, 387-388, 390-392, 394-396, 398, 403, 421

International Institute for Islamic Thought (IIIT), 343

Iran’s Islamic Revolution, 316, 423

Tranian Involvement, 337

Isaac II, 164

Isabella of Castile, 217

Ishmael, 16, 172, 397, 419

Islam’s hatred, 314

Islamic Association for Palestine (LAP), 346

Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), 343, 351, 409
Islamic domains, 128, 169, 205 Islamic Golden Age, 47 Islamic Holy War, 319
Islamic Republic’s Example, 321

Islamic Resistance Movement, 311-313, 403, 423

Islamic sacred history, 15

Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), 343, 346-347, 351

Islamic state (ISIS), 11, 40, 45, 47, 178, 259, 287, 317, 319, 334, 343, 358-359, 361-367, 369,
397, 400, 410~413, 424

Islamic state in India, 178
Islamophobic, 196, 371

J

Jacques Frangois de Menou, 257

Jafar al-Sadiq, 112

Jahiliyya, 66

Jainism, 237

Jalaluddin Khalji, 177

James Brant, 263

James H. Skene, 262

Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF), 315
Jan Sobieski, 230

INDEX 433

Janissaries, 187-190, 221, 228, 260, 389, 422

Jayachandra of Kanauj, 176

Jean-Baptiste Kléber, 257

Jews, 12, 22-24, 27-30, 34-36, 40, 43-45, 53-56, 66-67, 74, 83-85, 92, 95, 108, 115-117,

124-126, 128, 142-143, 147-151, 169-173, 202-204, 229, 231, 257, 261, 266-267, 283,
287, 300-310, 321, 326, 362, 380, 382-383, 390, 405, 419

Jihad Against China, 212

Jihad Against Myanmar, 368

Jihad Against the Christians, 40, 123, 127, 173
Jihad in Abeyance, 272

Jihad in Eastern Europe, 190, 200

Jihad in Europe, 77, 219

Jihad in India, 84-85, 88, 130-131, 175, 214, 217, 233, 239, 421
Jihad in Israel, 301, 423

Jihad in Rome, 107

Jihad in Spain, 77, 115, 175, 419

Jihad Movements, 296

Jizya, 11-12, 40-41, 44-45, 53-54, 56-57, 60-61, 63, 65-66, 82, 84-85, 91-92, nears 124,
136, 142, 164, 179, 204-205, 208, 213, 237, 248-249, 263, 362

Johannes Lepsius, 269

John Adams, 271, 344

John Brennan, 351, 365, 409-410
John of Gorze, 116

John of Nikiou, 62

John V Paleologus, 186, 189-190
John VI Cantacuzenus, 184, 186
John Zapolya, 222-223

Juday al-Kirmani, 91

K

Ka’b bin Al-Ashraf, 24, 35

Ka’b bin Asad, 31

Ka'bah, 16, 37

Karbala, 72-73, 242, 258

Karen Armstrong, 101, 115, 382
Keith Ellison, 345, 408

Kemal Ataturk, 264, 293, 316
Kemal Pasha Zadeh, 222

Kenneth R. Timmerman, 338, 407
Khalid bin al-Walid, 43, 50, 55, 61-62
Khan Jahan Bahadur, 246

Khaybar Raid, 34

Khedive, 283-284

434 THe History OF JIHAD: FRoM MuHamMAD to ISIS

Khomeini, 101, 316-320, 354, 403-404, 423-424
Khosrau, 40

Kinana bin al-Rabi (Kinana), 35-36

King Fernando I, 124

King Ramiro II, 118

Kingdom of Asturias, 82-83, 102, 115

Kingdom of Jerusalem, 152-153, 156, 163, 387
Kingdom of Leon, 115, 383, 420

Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), 293-294, 336

L

Lepanto, 226-227
Louis Alexandre Olivier de Corancez, 255
Lukas Notaras, 197, 199

M

Mahdi Revolt, 281, 286, 422
Mahmoud El! Nokrashy Pasha, 301
Mahmud Bigarha, 215-216
Mahmud Ghazni, 361

Mahmud Khalji, 214-215
Mahmud of Ghazni, 131-135
Mahomed Sayani, 280
Mahomedan Government, 279
Malik ibn Awf, 38

Malik ibn Nuwayrah, 50

Malik Safyad-din, 203

Maliki, 12-13, 108

Manuel II, 191, 195-196, 357, 371, 389
Manuel II Paleologus, 190-196, 357, 371, 389
Magqboo! Bhat, 315

Marco Polo, 161

Mark of Ephesus, 197

Marwan ibn Muhammad, 95~96
Maslama bin Habib, 49
McCarthyism, 347

Mecca, 16, 18, 25, 27, 32-33, 37-38, 46, 48, 54, 68, 72, 111-113, 134, 153, 202, 223, 225,
258-259, 269, 282, 288, 294, 302, 327, 331, 346

Medina, 22-23, 27-31, 34, 43, 48, 51, 62, 65, 68, 92, 111, 118, 207, 229, 258-259, 282, 302, 331
Mehmet Ali Pasha, 261

Mehmet II, 198-199, 222

Mehmet Talat Pasha, 290-291

INDEX

Mehomitan nation, 271

Michael [X Paleologus, 184

Michele Bachmann, 345, 408
Migrant Influx, 355, 359, 369

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, 227
Minhaj al-Siraj Juzjani, 131, 134
Mirza Muhammad Kazim, 245
Moldavia, 256

Moses ben Maimon, 172

Mu’adh bin Amr bin Al-Jamuh, 20
Mu'izz ad-Din Muhammad Ghori, 175
Muammar Gaddafi, 288, 341

Mughal! Babur, 234

Muhajiroun (emigrants), 27, 34, 48
Muhammad al-Maghili, 204
Muhammad al-Nasir, 174
Muhammad Ak Jinnah, 314
Muhammad bin Abdul Karim Al-Issa, 358
Muhammad bin Dawud Chaghni, 138
Muhammad bin Maslama, 24, 35
Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahhab, 253
Muhammad ibn Hasan al-Mahdi, 111
Muhammad ibn Tughlagq, 205-206
Muhammad ibn Tumart, 171
Muhammad Sa’im al-Dahr, 258
Muhammad Shah, 208, 215-216, 273
Muhammad Yusuf, 279

Muhammad's Battles, 45
Muhammad's death, 15, 47, 90
Muhammad's dictum, 105, 309, 313
Muhammadan religion, 240, 244, 248
Murad III, 228

Murshid Quli Khan, 273

Musa al-Nusayr, 77

Musa ibn Jafar al-Kazim, 112

Muslim American Society (MAS), 343, 346, 351, 401
Muslim Brotherhood, 296-298, 301, 306-308, 312, 322, 343, 345-349, 351, 408-409, 422
Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), 346, 350-351

Muslim rivals, 111, 155
Muslim Students Association (MSA), 343
Muslim World League (MWL), 348, 358, 411

435

436 Tue History or Jinap: Brom MuuamMap To ISIS

N

Nakhla raiders, 17

Nasiruddin Umar, 211

New Rigor, 228

Nicephoras Phocas, 142

Nicolae Ceausescu, 311
Nizamuddin Ahmed, 209, 214, 234
Nobel Peace Prize, 311

Nur ed-Din, 153, 155-156

O

Obama-era CIA, 339
Osama Bassnan, 334
Osama bin Laden, 322, 324-325, 327, 329, 334, 339-340, 405

Ottoman Empire, 181-187, 192-197, 200-201, 219-231, 251-262, 264-265, 268-283, 286-
287, 288-291, 294, 308 388-389, 396, 421-422

P
Pact of Umar, 61

Pakistan, 84, 131-132, 245, 298, 314-315, 322, 326, 335-337, 340, 369, 380, 384, 388, 403, 421
Palaces of al-Hirah, 28

Palaces of San’a, 28

Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), 309-313

Palestinian intifada, 313

Partition of India, 314, 369

Patrick Calvar, 359

Paul Alvarus, 117

Pelayo’s Kingdom of Asturias, 82, 115

Pelayo's men, 82

Persian Empire, 29, 47, 71

Philip II, 164

Philip TV, 168

Philip VI, 182

Pilgrimage, 32, 46, 54, 112, 147, 179, 202, 224-225, 248, 282, 346
Pious, 20-21, 64, 96, 125, 181, 215, 217, 246, 284, 286, 294, 297, 322, 404
Pius V, 226-227

PLO Council, 310

Pope Francis, 184, 230, 357-359, 361, 411-412

Pope Gregory VIII, 164

Pope Honorius IV, 167

Pope Innocent II, 165, 174, 387

Pope Urban II, 141, 143, 145,

INDEX 437

149, 152, 169, 385

Prithviraj Chauhan, 175
Protestants, 220, 223
Proto-Multiculturalism, 11, 115

Q

Qabisah ibn Tyas, 52

Qadiriyyah, 280

Qarmatians, 111-113, 130, 258, 282

Quraysh, 16-21, 23, 25, 28-29, 32-34, 37-39, 45, 48, 50, 71, 95, 274

R

Racism, 347

Radulph of Caen, 148

Ramiro III, 123

Reconquista, 83, 143, 169, 171, 175, 218
Renaissance, 101, 189, 200, 344
Republic of Ragusa, 183
Rightly-Guided Caliphs, 47, 67, 281, 314, 418
Robert Mueller, 350-351

Rodrigo, 127-128, 174

Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar, 127-128
Rohingya Muslims, 369, 413

S

Sad ibn Mu'adh, 30, 101
Sa’id Raja’i-Khorassani, 319
Sadagqa, 24

Saddam Hussein, 325, 342
Safavid Persians, 219
Safavid Shah Ismail, 219
Safiyya bint Huyayy, 36
Saif al-Dawla, 142

Sajah bint al-Harith, 49
Salch al-Hussayen, 334
Saleh Harb Pasha, 308
Saleha Mahmoud Abedin, 347
Salman Rushdie, 101
Salman the Persian, 28
Salwa al-Mutairi, 366
Samuel ibn Naghrila, 124

438 Tue History or JinaAD: FROM MUHAMMAD TO ISIS

Sancho II, 127

Saqa Mustad Khan, 245-246, 249
Sassanian nulers, 53

Sassanid Empire, 54, 59

Sassanid Persia, 47, 52

Satan's daughter, 294

Sayyid Ahmad Khan, 279-280
Second Crusade, 153, 155

Selim I, 220

Selim IT, 224-225

Selim II], 257

Seljuk Turks, 135, 138, 167
September 11 attacks, 332, 340, 407
Shah Alam I, 276

Shah Jahan, 243-245, 248

Shah Wali Allah, 274-275

Shaiba bin Rabi’a, 19
Shamsuddin Iltutmish, 177
Sharaf ad-Din Ali Yazdi, 210
Shari’a, 318

Shaykh al-Thumairy, 334

Shi'ite Fatimid caliphate, 130, 135, 139, 156
Shujau-d Daula, 273

Sibt ibn al-Jawzi, 138

Sicily, 90, 102-104, 107, 297

Sidi Haji Abdrahaman, 271, 344
Sigismund of Hungary, 192
Sikandar Lodi, 216-217, 233-234
Sindhi king Dahir, 87

Six-Day War, 309

Slavery, 102, 104, 128-129, 133, 138, 167, 174, 177, 198, 201, 222, 232-233, 265, 285, 365,
394, 397, 420

Sodomy, 366

St. Martin of Tours, 93

Stephen of Bosnia, 201

Steven Runciman, 198, 378, 390, 420
Sublime Porte, 226, 251, 261-262
Suhayl bin Amr, 32

Suleiman al-Halabi, 257

Suleyman al-Arabi, 97
Suleymanshah, 141

Sultanate of Rum, 141, 181-182

INDEX 439

Sunni revivalist movement, 336
Sunni/shi’ite Schism, 72
Syed Z, Abedin, 348

iy

Tabari, 45, 54-55, 57, 60-61, 69-70, 89, 93, 110, 374-379, 381-382, 417-420
Tabuk, 41, 46

Taifa of Zaragoza, 128

Taliban, 342

Tamerlane in India, 192, 196, 209

Tarikh-us-Subuktigin, 135

Tariq ibn Ziyad, 77, 84, 103, 131, 175, 218, 292, 361

Terror, 15, 21, 26-27, 30-31, 56, 79, 123, 137, 156, 188, 262, 318, 320, 322, 331, 339, 341,
349, 354, 358, 368, 371, 403-405, 408, 424

Thagif tribe, 38

Theophanes the Confessor, 100, 379, 419

Theophilus’ service, 106

Thomas Jefferson, 271-272, 344

Treaty of Hudaybiyya, 32, 34

Trebizond, 167, 200

Tugrul Beg, 137-138

Tulayhah ibn Khuwaylid, 50

U

Ubaydallah b. Yahya, 119

Uhud, 25, 27, 45-46, 65, 95
Umaiya bin Khalaf, 19

Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz, 83, 89, 91
Umayyad Caliphate, 72, 83, 381, 418-419
Umayyad Spain, 116, 129

Umm Kulthum, 34

Umm Tamim bint al-Minhal, 51
Ugba bin Abi Mu’ait, 19

Ugba ibn Nafi, 73

Usamah ibn Mungidh, 149

Utba bin Rabi’a, 19

Utbah bin Ghazwan, 59

V
Vassal Byzantine Emperors, 189
Vijayanagara Empire, 235-236
Vlad Dracula, 201

440) THe History or Jinan: From MonamMan To ISIS

WwW

Wahhabi Revolt, 253
Wallachia, 197, 253, 256, 265
White Revolution, 316
William Buckley, 321, 404
William Butler Yeats, 101
William Casey, 321

William Finch, 243

William of Tyre, 158

World Day of Peace, 358, 411
World Islamic Front, 326, 405
World Trade Center, 324, 329, 332, 338
World War II, 288, 308, 314

x
Xenophobia, 358, 371

Y

Yaghi-Siyan, 148

Yasir Arafat, 309

Yazdegerd IIT, 58

Yehudit Barsky, 335

Yusuf al-Mu'taman ibn Hud, 128
Yusuf al-Qaradawi, 199

Yusuf ibn Tashfin, 126

Z

Zahir Muhsein, 310
Zayd ibn al-Khattab, 255
Ziauddin Barani, 179
Zidan Abu Maali, 231
Zimmi, 45, 179, 207
Zoroastrianism, 237

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Robert Spencer is director of Jihad Watch, a program of the David
Horowitz Freedom Center, where he is a Shillman Fellow. He is the
author of eighteen books, including The New York Times bestsellers
The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) and The Truth
About Muhammad. Spencer has led seminars on Islam and jihad for
the FBI, the United States Central Command, United States Army
Command and General Staff College, the U.S. Army’s Asymmetric
Warfare Group, the Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF), the Justice
Department’s Anti-Terrorism Advisory Council, and the U.S. intel-
ligence community. He has discussed jihad, Islam, and terrorism at a
workshop sponsored by the U.S. State Department and the German
Foreign Ministry. He is a consultant with the Center for Security

Policy.

THE COMPREHENSIVE HISTORY OF THE ROLE OF
WAR AND TERROR IN THE SPREAD OF ISLAM.

It is taken for granted, even among many Washington policymakers, that Islam is a
fundamentally peaceful religion and that Islamic jihad terrorism is something relatively
new, a product of the economic and political ferment of the twentieth century, But
in The History of Jihad: From Muhammad to ISIS, Islamic scholar Robert Spencer
proves definitively that Islamic terror is as old as Islam itself, as old as Muhammad, the

prophet of Islam, who said “I have been made victorious through terror.’

Spencer briskly traces the 1,400-year war of Islamic jihadis against the rest of the
world, detailing the jihad against Europe, including the 700-year struggle to conquer
Constantinople; the jihad in Spain, where non-Muslims fought for another 700 years
to get the jihadi invaders out of the country; and the jihad against India, where Muslim
warriors and conquerors wrought unparalleled and unfathomable devastation in the

name of their religion.

Told in great part in the words of contemporary chroniclers themselves, both Muslim
and non-Muslim, The History of Jihad shows that jihad warfare has been a constant
of Islam from its very beginnings, and present-day jihad terrorism proceeds along
exactly the same ideological and theological foundations as did the great Islamic
warrior states and jihad commanders of the past.

The History of Jihad: From Muhammad to ISIS is the first one-volume history of
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bloody history in an age when Islamic jihadis are more assertive in Western countries
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the geopolitical situation of the twenty-first century, and ultimately to formulating
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